Category Archives: Shows

Join Chuck Harold while he discusses the topic of Human Sex Trafficking with Co-Host Tonya Brinza-Lariviere & Logan Clarke. Logan Clarke has spent 30 years in Government and Private Investigations and in many circles, is considered one of the top investigators in the world today. Highly publicized & an expert consultant for 60 minutes, 48 hrs, 20/20, KABC Radio and many others. Mr. Clarke and his team have investigated over 8000 cases including Murder, Human Sex Trafficking, kidnap … they have rescued over 300 kidnap and runaway victims, many of whom were forced into HUMAN SEX TRAFFICKING. www.gp-pi.com.

Join Chuck Harold while he discusses the topic of Security Startups with Ted Gutierrez & Daniel Hernandez of AlarmBud.com. How to Start & Promote an Alarm Company with AlarmBud.com.

We know you have many options to choose from when it comes to Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) Systems, and you will find that SecurityBud guarantees customer satisfaction. When you choose SecurityBud, you are choosing to let in many moments of peace to come into your lifestyle. Notice that CCTV systems are not all created equally. While the other guys tell you what they can’t do.

With PlateSmart, you can turn ANY conventional surveillance camera into an analytical Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) camera. But PlateSmart is not just an ordinary license plate reader. We provide the most accurate, complete, and affordable ALPR software solutions for your organization. Our award-winning technology provides proactive real-time security as well as business intelligence by using video analytics based on ALPR.

Chuck Harold & Guests

John Chigos Platesmart.com

Chuck HaroldThe Security Guy

Full text of radio show

Please forgive any typos, this podcast was transcribed by my typing pool comprised of volunteer stalkers.

Chuck: Welcome to a special Facebook version of Security Guy Radio with Chuck. What am I today? Travis, I blanked out, what should I be today?

Travis:I don’t know. Let’s think of some new…

Chuck: Chuck Facebook Harold I guess, I don’t know…

Travis: Yeah, there we go that’s it.Chuck: So, this is a test of our Facebook show, we’re streaming live on Facebook its very exciting and what do you think about this? Is this going to put us over the top?

Travis: Yeah, I think so.

Chuck: I think it’s really cool.

Travis: The idea is cool. Yeah.

Chuck: So, now what you guys could do is you are watching this on Facebook and
you’re on my Facebook page, you can actually go to the comment section and type
in comments and ask questions and we’ll try and answer them. Sounds fun?

Travis: Sounds fun to me.

Chuck: Now, you know, I was at ISC West last week, right?

Travis: Uh hmm.

Chuck: I did 14 shows. I didn’t realize I did that many shows.

Travis: Really.

Chuck: Did them all processed around YouTube, they’re on SoundCloud put them out, but I think probably my favorite product of the show and that’s saying a lot because there’s lot of paper products was a License Plate Recognition software, that’s really different than all the other software recognition plates and now you, you have not heard of this have you?

Travis: Uh huh.

Chuck: Because you’re my canary in a coal mine…

Travis: Right.

Chuck: And I have to test you with all these security products, right?

Travis: Right.

Chuck: So, the importance of License Plate Recognition is that it creates data in other words it captures license plates, it looks at cars, it saves in a database and let’s say, somebody was coming by the studio and comes by here five times a day a camera will capture that save it, and then send you an email that says, you know, what, Travis is stalking Chuck because he comes by the station five times a day and the same license plate keeps showing up, so it looks for anomalies in those patterns and I thought today we’d talk about this in conjunction with terrorism, because this is really a big deal and I think License Plate Recognition could be, you know, probably the most important tool
we have in the fight against terrorism and today I’m going to work on my special guest Mr. John Chigos of PlateSmart. He is President and CEO, welcome John, welcome, welcome to the show. [Applause] all right, do we have connection, you there John?

John C.: Yes, I am.

Chuck: All right excellent.

John C.:Very much of an introduction.

Chuck: So, we had a great chat right after ISC West and we found that you and I have similar views on all this kind of stuff and we both think this is very, very important and sometimes we’re beating a silent drum because people don’t quite get it, but I know you’re a guy that gets it and I want you to explain to people, you know, little bit about your background and how you came to form this company. It’s a really fascinating story and it’s, it’s driven by, you know actual events that made, made an impact on your life.

John C.: Okay. I will discuss that and I’ll, bring you up to speed on why I started this company and why we’re so different from every other technology out there after 9/11, 9/11 affected everyone. It affected me especially in a very difficult way in that. My office is we’re in New York and I lived in Florida and I commuted on a Monday through Friday basis to my offices in New York and I had meetings in the towers pretty much every week, you know, even though my offices’ were 14 blocks away I would meet in the towers, meet bankers, meet clients there, as I represented a lot of companies that were looking for financing and
going public et cetera, and that weekend I got the flu, so I decided to stay home.

Unfortunately, the morning of the attack I turned on the news as I was in bed and I watched the first plane crashed into the tower and I was horrified and my immediate thought was again, you know, everybody thought may have been accidental, but I thought, “Oh my God, this is finally happening. Al-Qaeda has made good on their promise to attack us here in U S and they did it, upon seeing the second tower go and be hit I knew it wasn’t an accident at that point, but what I also knew was is that as I was watching the footage, I was watching friends, family, my own personal financial background being wiped out, in a matter of minutes my entire life changed.

As did the lives of so many thousands of people that day and quite honestly it affected everybody in different ways it affected me quite differently and I knew I lost friends, I knew I lost family members, and I knew I, I lost most of the family’s future because of the types of work I did and all that disappeared that day, but what was most important to me was not money, not anything. It was the fact that this occurred on our soil this occurred in our backyard in New York, my home, the place I went to every week to go to work. It affected me to the point where I actually, you know, went and spent most of my next two years in
China, working there because, one, I knew my family was safe in Florida. I couldn’t get to my offices in New York because they were still cordoned off and at least in China I did not have this overwhelming sense of that, you know, another terrorist attack was going to happen in China, because, you know, I’ve never had that type of experience in China, but it’s always been a wonderful experience business-wise, culturally wise, people wise. I came back in 2004 and decided it was time to start looking at rebuilding my life and as I was, driving along the highway I got off by a car and I looked up to try to capture the plate and I absolutely could not capture the plate, could not see it, it was already gone.

So that got me into thinking and I called the local Law Enforcement Agency and asked to do a ride along with them and they agreed. I had to sign some paperwork waiving some rights, if I got hurt in the car et cetera, no problem. The minute we left, the security of the police agency a truck crossed over the double yellow line in front of the police car and the police car pull d this vehicle over into an abandoned shopping mall and as we sat there, I set my watch and I hit the timer on it and it took eighteen and a half minutes of the officer being exposed to this individual in the truck and me being exposed in the police car, which was locked by the officer, so it couldn’t be opened from the inside out and I was actually stuck right there and I’m thinking to myself, great, if this guy flips out, I have nowhere to go. I’m sitting right here and the officer was kind enough to leave his taser in the car, but a lot of good that we’ve done me,but all joking aside eighteen and a half minutes later we found out this was an individual who was wanted for an attempted homicide with a deadly weapon and was considered a very dangerous individual. That led me to the process of thinking about how do we identify vehicles much quicker, much easier and in a way that an officer can have the information before he can ever even get out of his car to approach the vehicle.

So, I spent the next several years researching the matter, travelling around the world, looking at different technologies and you know, during that time I had founded three technologies. Video analytic, using a video camera and video footage to basically, you know, determine the plate number, okay and it also painted a symbol technology type of recognition where you’d stick something on the license plate that would be identified by a laser and an RFID device, a radio frequency device. The latter two did not pass muster in my book because it would take the state legislation in every state to approve that type of
application, which I deemed impossible at the time for any State to agree on anything other than, you know, how to put themselves into more debt and they were already doing, so I developed this system and after looking at other LPR systems around the world, I realized there was a major fault with their systems. They’re all relied on infrared camera technology, basically that basically means that they use infrared light to bounce off of the license plate, which has reflective coding to get it back to their camera, so they can decide for, the OCR or Optical Character Recognition element of it and say this is an L, this is a R, this is a B, and they have to go through a lot of different processes.

They had to use a lot of expensive equipment at the time the average price of a LPR system was $50,000 or more and I said there had to be a better way, so I set out with a group of engineers, and I decided to develop a technology that would be software only. The reason for software only is so many agencies, so many Law Enforcement Agencies already had cameras deployed that could be utilized for this purpose, excuse me and having these cameras meant that more unit, more agencies would be able to deploy LPR quicker and faster, and I hoped that, you know, I could do this one altruistic thing for people, especially for Law Enforcement Officers, especially Amber Alert children, children taken by a pedophile, a parent or somebody without permission of their parents and in lot of cases be brutally abused and in fact one case that I’ll never forget was a little blonde haired girl from the State of Florida that was finally located in Georgia and the little girl is as close as one could describe a little girl being a princess as you can imagine, just absolutely beautiful blue eyes, blond hair just the whole future, her whole future in front of her, and yet the final images that I saw that, you know, unfortunately I saw and were not published to the general public.

This child was no longer a child, it was just I think a piece of, you know, brutally a meat, and I actually had to close my office door for quite a while and to gather myself, because of the amount of the effect it had on me after that I went out and I spoke to my developers, and I said, do you realize this is all of our problem, this is all of our situation here. This could have been any one of your daughters, it could have been my daughter, it’s the reason I started this company, it’s the reason we want to protect people from the bad guys. The bad guys will never hesitate to use the guns, they will never hesitate to use stolen plates, they’ll never hesitate to steal a vehicle, and they’ll never hesitate and the FBI has proven this in a study that a bad guy who has a gun has a two to three second advantage on any officer under most any circumstance, so officers are fighting a losing battle here, and I thought, okay this is something I can do to help back and I thought I’d be done within two years, and I would have done something that was beneficial.

Well it didn’t take two years, it took ten years of hard work to develop a system of software that could basically work with any type of camera, from any manufacturer under any circumstance, day or night, 365 days, a week, a year, you know, 52 weeks a year, seven days a week, you know, 24/7 and the theory behind it was if we made the software cheap enough everybody could adapt it, and what it did do, it caused the industry to really come to terms with itself all the promises that the other, companies in this field promised that they did not live up to the fact that they could read stage jurisdiction and they did not,
disappeared. The fact that they were the most accurate systems out there, no one has ever published results at all on their research, on how accurate their systems are. People are, you know, being told one thing and yet these systems are doing another, so…

Chuck: So, let’s talk about that really quick John. Let’s talk about why that’s the case, right. What the standard is and what the actual reality is. So, I remember back in the day when I looked at purchasing this stuff, like you said, it was 50 grand and I had to buy all their cameras and I had to put several cameras at a gate, and you know, I don’t know that I got a 50% accuracy on the readings when I put these at HOAs or things like that right?

John C.: Most likely you didn’t.

Chuck: Right and that’s because we’re you are doing optical, what OCR…

John C.: Character Recognition.

Chuck: Right and yours different. Yours not using that and that’s why you’re able to capture plates and makes some of models of cars and things and we’re going to play the video that we did at ISC West in a minute and it will go through all the technical stuff, but it was really amazing to me why the industry had gone this other way, and I’m glad to see you went this way, because this is the actual way that makes more sense. Explain to me what the major differences are in these two types of systems between yours and the other folks will call, right, what are the major differences?

John C.: It was always important to me that whatever video you captured had data in it, and whatever the data was you needed to be able to extract that data. Now if you are using simple OCR technology the best you can do is extract the alphanumeric code and you have to go through many of these companies, and you know, they’re probably not going to be very happy with me in telling me their secrets about what they do, but they use reflectivity if they do not have reflectivity they cannot see your plate.

Chuck: Oh, so the California License Plate, its black with yellow lettering it’s not going to work, that’s so good.

John C.: Well it depends upon just how much reflectivity there is. We chose to choose a path of using object identification and color. Everything we do was in color, whether its day or night, or I can even simply use the system with an IR camera and do the same job as they do, but do it better because our technology is much more robust in the back end. Our technology isn’t, protected by patents; it’s protected by trade secrets. Why because we were so different in our approach. You know, we follow up numbers of patents, blocking patents et cetera, but the essential technology is geared around object recognition, because of that I can now identify the type of car, a vehicle; you know, what a vehicle is. I can tell you whether it’s a sedan, or I can tell you whether it’s a van or an SUV or a commercial vehicle or a non-commercial vehicle.

I can tell you the color of the vehicle, I can tell you the jurisdiction of that vehicle, and I can tell you the alphanumeric code of the plate. If I only have a partial read I can look at that information and gather the rest of the data to identify that vehicle through other methodologies, but we do not have this routine of I’ll shoot a plate once then twice and then if I have an eight in it, and then I’ll go back and I’ll switch that eight with a B because they look so similar, and I’ll search that database again and if I have a seven and a one,
I’ll do the same thing and then if I have a, you know, a four and a five; any characters that have similarities can throw these other systems off hence changes their accuracy rates. There was one European study that was done and I am not privy to the name of the study at this moment, but it showed the average accuracy most of these systems in the 70, 60 to 70% range.

Chuck: That’s it 60 to 70% that’s low.

John C.: Well, you know, there is a company that I know that uses, different companies use different ways of looking at accuracy. We have a 21 page paper on our site. It’s a white paper on how accuracy should be identified. I think one of my nearest competitors has a two page paper on how accuracy is identified, so essentially if we pass a 100 cars or a 100 cars pass our system, we’ll actually count all 100 cars, and then we’ll look at how many of those cars did we actually capture plates on. So usually that’s 98%, 97% percent and then we’ll actually look out of plates that we caught, how many of those plates were correctly read and that’s another percentage point, and that gives us our accuracy range, and were in the 90% range, I’m not going to go on to the specifics of we’re the best at this or that, but I know we can do better than anyone else.

Chuck: Now, let’s talk about why this is so important how we tie this to terrorism, right, because you and I talk about this for a long time.

John C.: Terrorism, yeah.

Chuck: I think this is the most significant tool we can use, because everybody needs to drive a car to get somewhere eventually, right?

John C.: Exactly.

Chuck: Terrorists don’t take the bus necessarily and in pre-planning they are doing surveillance, right?

John C.: Exactly.

Chuck: So, I remember when I was at Disney we had one day were a car with about five properties of Burbank, right and when I was living in lodge a week later I found this one license plate that kept driving by all the studio locations taking photographs and had we had something like yours it would recognize it right away and feed me the data then I could see a pattern, I could say this same license plate is at five different locations, I got an anomaly here I got a pattern and I can act upon it and I think people don’t understand it that if we have this kind of information, were its constantly looking at license plates all around the country, at all the different places in finding cars that, you know, travel across country maybe your or shop in the same place at the same time that data could be used to solve all kinds of things and…

John C.: Exactly. You know, and there’s a lot of data here that people have this perception that, you know, Law Enforcement is trying to spy on them, that, you know, we as a company are trying to spy on them. I am the biggest advocate of privacy rights that you’ll ever meet. I love guns, I own guns. I’m not afraid to say that. I don’t want people invading my privacy, but a plate is open to the preview of any individual and under the Constitution, under the Fourth Amendment, it is clearly stated that anything in that open nature that is available to the human eye is not protected by any privacy. The fact that a system may gather your plate and put it into a database really doesn’t ever mean anything other than your plate run into a database it’s going to reside there for 90 days and get deleted if that’s what the state legislation decides is the appropriate period of time.

Chuck: By the way it might, it might not be that that plate actually identifies you.

John C.: Exactly.

Chuck: Because initially the plate can go into a database and be saved as just a bunch of numbers and letters.

John C.: Exactly.

Chuck: Then if we see a pattern then police can go on, get a warrant and say, “Listen, we want to search, get more information of this particular plate. We want to run it and then we, we get into issues.

John C.: [Crosstalk] [0:21:05] and look at the data and, you know, where is this really come in handy knowing what plates are older than others that are in the database in any type of Amber Alert situation, you have pedophiles that have to fight urges, you know, some people say these are, are individuals with the disease that they cannot control, so if that’s the case, they cannot control the behavior that they are going to exhibit in the future, so basically it means that they may use the same vehicle to go by a school, where you expect your children to be safe and yet because there’s not a way of actively capturing them and saying you’re in violation of your probation, you’re within 200 yards of a school zone or a 100 yards of a school zone. These people can still look at your children, follow them home and possibly abduct them.

Now I can’t imagine any parent out there that’s ever experienced this, but I’m often, often asked by privacy advocates, the staunchest guys out there that have basically, you know, come short of calling me everything, but anything that I would like to be called to say that I am violating the rights of every individual out there and I say to them, “Do you have children?” And they say “Yes.” “Do you love your children?” “Yes.” “What would you give if you could bring that child back within a few hours of her or his abduction?” “I’d do anything at that point” I said “Well that is what LPR is about initially. That’s how it started and that’s the reason for it. It was about bringing children home safely, in a time period when it was thought that these children were still safe, the first three hours of their abduction. If we could locate them, triangularly plates that we’ve have spotted through multiple LPR systems we could possibly triangulate and bring that child home.

Chuck: Now the data is captured in real time, correct?

John C.: Yes. Captured in real time compared against real databases in real time we do everything in real time. Every time the National NCIS, which is the national criminal database, is updated every Law Enforcement Agency that uses our system their database is updated as well, so they’re always working with the most pertinent information, you know, if somebody comes off of the database its erased from the system, their plate is no longer on the database. Now we’ve had a situation, where we’ve had certain companies that do repossession work and that they sell their database to commercial entities for varying purposes.

Mostly for repossession, but I’ve heard of other rumors of them selling it to access credit scores to assess other reasons and I’m totally against that. I believe that’s a violation of one’s privacy, because a lot of these repo companies travel in the same circles and again I am not going to deny the fact that we sell to a repo company or to an agency that does repossessions because they have a legitimate business reason. When somebody borrows money from a bank, they’re guarantying that bank that they’re going to pay their bill on time and take care of this vehicle, yeah, if they don’t pay their bills, who get stuck with the bill finally? The bank get stuck with it, the consumer gets stuck with it and the individual who has not paid the bill often doesn’t get prosecuted, because it’s not worth the effort of prosecuting them for a $20,000 car because the prosecution will cost more.

Chuck: So, in that business your software is used to set up on a street or some traffic area and as cars go by, you can say, “Hey, wait a minute. That’s a car that’s on the repossession list and here is where we saw it.”

John C.: Again if, if it’s the agency that does that type of work, yes. For Law Enforcement, they usually do not have that information. The information they’re out there with most Law Enforcement Agencies or the State database, which, for like Florida, FDLE which is the Florida Department of Law Enforcement database. It has a list of all the stolen vehicles in Florida, all outstanding warrants et cetera also, there is local databases, which individual agencies use to manage their own individual issues that they suffer within the jurisdiction of that Law Enforcement Agency, so that database is there and the database from an NCIS,
which is used both in Canada, Mexico and in the U S is National Criminal Database, so our system checks all those databases, so if your vehicle is on one of those databases, we will find it, we’ll identify it to an Officer and an Officer at that point has a choice. Most times the violations he gets are minor violations and they’re really not worth his time to pursue unless, obviously he wants to. Those are the not the guys I’m concerned about.

The guys I’m concerned about are the drug dealers that Timothy McVeigh’s and we put that Timothy McVeigh has a technology, in our technology, in our, we have the most advanced video analytics technologies for license plates in vehicles out in the industry. We’ve won the Government’s Award, the Govies for video analytics three years in a row over all other companies, because we actually produce data from the data we collect and that data helps identify people that are potentially dangerous. If we had this type of system at Columbine, the two individuals that went into that school with all that military hardware and it’s not, you know, a gun is only as dangerous as the person who uses it, as we saw in San Bernardino. When you saw a woman in a burqa get out of her SUV and take out an AK-47 and cock it in the back of, of a school zone, you know, pre-kid, pre-kindergarten kids, there’s a real issue there. Why did that happen in California and not in Texas, because I guarantee you in Texas where there is an open carry law that person would have never made it to cocking that gun or trying to aim it at anyone.

Chuck: So, let’s go back to the Columbine example, so I, I got this setup at a school and I’m using school cameras because your software, I don’t know if we mentioned this enough, but we should reemphasize it. Your software can be used on existing camera systems. This is the big difference.

John C.: Yes absolutely, it is, yes.

Chuck: So, I don’t want to buy a special camera, that’s the, the big deal.

John C.: No. You do not need to buy, I mean, reemphasize it. We can work with any camera from any manufacturer, from any country and most of our partners are leading manufacturers of cameras around the world. Why they’re choosing to work with us is because cameras are becoming commodities. You know, cameras that several years ago may have sold for several thousand dollars are now selling for $500. The price of cameras have come down so greatly that it is making it hard for these camera companies to stay in business, by having this added ability to add an LPR into a plat, cameras platform like we do with Samsung, for instance, it makes those cameras enable to utilize our technology to identify vehicles that are potentially threats.

Chuck: So, let’s give an example of how we would utilize this and tell me if I’m wrong in my sample, so we take… We take Burbank, City of Burbank. City of Burbank has cameras around the city. It’s got cameras at their public buildings. It has cameras at their schools and let’s just assume that that all feeds into the police department. We can put your software on that network and start gathering license plates throughout the city and if we happen to see some kid’s license plate that keeps coming by Burbank High School 25 times every day and all day long that could be surveillance. It’s going to register that as anomaly, if we see certain patterns of a license plate around a school that’s a pedophile
and we know it’s a registered pedophile and he keeps showing up at a school, it can capture that in real-time and send us that information, right?

John C.: Exactly, because those databases, you know, the pedophile database is available any individual that doesn’t realize that they can go online and look in their general premises of where they reside and see where the pedophiles living around them, which when I did it, I was quite surprised…

Chuck: Oh, they are everywhere, they’re everywhere.

John C.: Very residential area. Within a half mile, I had three pedophiles there who were convicted of some serious offenses that got out of jail, now were living. I couldn’t even let my daughter play outside our home, which is in a secluded protected area, without the fear of this happening and take Columbine excuse me. You had individuals that had threatened the school, have threaten the, student body were expelled, were on an expelled list, and were potentially considered dangerous. If they had entered the premises, if we had to LPR up and using the school’s cameras the minute they re-entered the school in their vehicles, which they did in fact do, security would have been notified and Law Enforcement would have been notified at the same time. I won’t mention the name of the University we just did a large installment at a major University and within 48 hours they caught four pedophiles.

Chuck: 48 hours, wow.

John C.: Within four hours.

Chuck: I’m sorry.

John C.: In 48 hours they caught four pedophiles that should not have been on
campus.

Chuck: That’s amazing.

John C.: Now you have students that register their cars, but when asked if they’ve ever been convicted of a crime they say, no and you never think twice about it, until they register their car, you never think twice about it, but now those same students that have registered and said they’ve never been convicted of anything, all of a sudden they could show up on a pedophile list, because the Law Enforcement database, you know that most colleges will actually tie into Law Enforcement Agencies and work in conjunction with them to better protect their students from sexual offenders, from sexual predators, from students that wish to do harm. I mean, the examples go on and on at Sandy Hook, Virginia, you know…

Chuck: Virginia Tech, yeah.

John C.: Virginia Tech, you know, we go on for schools and keep going on.

Chuck: Can I ask you a question about the legalities, so are there any States in the United States that don’t allow License Plate Recognition software or have certain restrictions where data has to be saved a certain way, encrypted a certain way or is it fairly standard? I mean to me, I’m with you this is public information. Your license plate on the freeway in front of me in a traffic jam is not private, I’m sorry. Who it’s registered to is as car is a private, right? But the plate is in public, and your plate and your car and you’re driving is public behavior and we can record that and see what’s going on, so is there any legal challenges in any States?

John C.: Exactly. Yes, there are. You know, a state like Louisiana does not allow LPR under any circumstance.

Chuck: Well, they are French, that’s why.

John C.: They’ve brought into the ACLU and the civil liberties argument that privacy is the utmost concern of every individual in this country and I argue, if that’s the case we will be facing a situation and you know, the situation has made itself very clear and this is the ISIS situation. Our administration has claimed that ISIS is on the down turn, there are no longer a real threat, we shouldn’t be worried about them here in the U S, but a week ago or two weeks ago when they attacked Brussels there’s some accounts of a car driving to that airport five times, ten times up to 25 times was the hard, the highest count that I heard of a vehicle driving through the airport without stopping, without anything other than simply driving to the airport on five consecutive days. If we’ve looked at vehicle and say, okay, this is a problem it’s circling, I mean it’s going through an airport; it’s going through an area a soft targeted area. Airports itself can be considered a soft target on one aspect and that it’s easy to access the common area for airside, for landside, excuse me with luggage. The FBI did a study and probably they’re not going to be happy with me for saying this, but the study showed that and they left luggage all over different airports around the country, and you know, the luggage was never really identified. No one ever open it up to see if there was anything in it.

They simply, you know, notified the card holder on that thing and hoped that those people would come back. What happened was that you know FBI found out that it’s not so safe to do this, Ben Gurion Airport the Israeli people have taken it upon themselves to make themselves watched guards. You know, if I was to leave my luggage in Ben Gurion, and walk away to the rest room, by the time I got back, I would have be facing one or two situations my luggage would’ve either been confiscated or I’d be interrogated by a guard as to why I left my luggage unattended causing a havoc in the airport, because it’s one of the safest airports. Everything that goes into that airport is checked before they check it. Now the individuals that did the Brussels account. The reason they did that was we knew in Paris the attack on Paris that killed 124 people I believe or 114 people in December, in the November-December period was an executed attack. It was strategic, it was well-planned, well-executed. Individuals from the ISIS’s organization all rented well not all some rented vehicles in Brussels and drove back to Paris in rental cars. If anyone had bothered to check who was renting cars in Brussels, and saw that these individuals were on watch lists and they saw that more than one individual that was renting that car was on a suspected terrorist watch list, but maybe two, maybe three individuals were all coming
back at the same time.

What do you think the outcome of that would have been? We would have probably intercepted those vehicles before they got to Paris and tried to figure out, why this is occurring? See this is the thing I’ve been trying to explain to people. I’m not trying to, you know; get involved in your privacy. I don’t care if you go to whatever type of business, or clubs, or dinner place or, you know, what you do in your private time. If you’re not on one of these lists, your plate’s not going to be looked at in detail. It’s going to go on to a database and sit there until the State says we can erase it, because the legislation of the state it’s up to them to determine how long a plate should be kept in a database so, you know, much like the ACLU I agreed with them. In general I believe LPR is a fantastic technology, in general I believe that there have to be some limitations as to how long a plate can be kept in a database. Why because plates do go stale, license plates do get transferred over a period of time, and they’re no longer relevant, but the fact that I may have captured the same person’s plate 500 times, and it’s sitting in somebody’s database would probably piss them off, which it has, excuse my language, I apologize about that, but it would upset me that.

Okay, my plate’s been captured 500 hundred times because these guys who just traveling around in circles, but again that data is not being utilized for any purpose, unless somebody is trying to commercialize it for a different reason then I am totally against that. So I’ve agreed that there have to be certain limitations, and I have agreed that video analytics in general, when we talk about video analytics, you know, Chuck, what do you think of, I think that would be, you know, in the past I think, behavioral analytics, any type of behavior that might indicate some type of foreseen action taken by an individual or object detection or an object has moved in this video and makes, I’m a little nervous about it. What kind of object am I looking at, is it luggage is it a car? Is it, you know, how do I specify and make all those alerts, because they throw up thousands of false alerts and they’re not, you cannot possibly check all the alerts to see if they’re relevant or not. The thing that’s different about LPR is, if it throws of an alert it is their fight right then and there it’s either correct or it’s incorrect, it’s on a database, or it’s not on a database.

If it is on the database, then you have actionable Intel and if you’re looking for people that, you know, we know especially in Tampa we had a, you know, a University professor who is an Al-Qaeda member then we extradited him out of this. We know that there are terrorists here in this area. We know there are terrorists in all 50 States because, you know, we know that the FBI has over 1000 open cases against ISIS’s members in the U S currently. If you measure that number against what that number was last year, I think you’d be surprised and I won’t come out and say what that number is, but I’ll let it, be up to the individuals that claim privacy concerns and claim all these things to do some research on their own and look at how the data is being used.

Chuck: So, if we’re finding this data in real-time.

John C.: Any agencies, cities that are now putting up city surveillance systems to make sure that their citizens are safe from attacks.

Chuck: No, I got a question on the timing, so let me look re-back up on the timing, so let’s say legislators keep the data for 90 days.

John C.: Yeah.

Chuck: This is at real time, and we have a guy that shows up every Wednesday, maybe that doesn’t pop the database for anomaly, because maybe a lot of people show up Wednesday, right?

John C.: Exactly.

Chuck: But, it’s, [indiscernible] [0:40:13] right, but is 90 days a long enough time to get some analytics on that, should it be longer maybe, I don’t know.

John C.: You know, and again I think, rather than me; answer that question, that’s a question for our legislators in both houses to address seriously. I’ve written letters to Congressmen and have not got a feedback other than “Thank you for your concern” but the letters I’ve asked are simply letters of concerns saying, if you’re going to fund a fusion center in a State…

Chuck: Explain what a fusion centers to people so they…

John C.: Fusion centers are centers that states set up to gather data and keep data current that can be shared with other States or other agencies within the other States, so if you are going to fund a fusion center that gathers LPR for instance, why don’t you make it mandatory. If I’m using federal funds that you as a State now have to share that State with A, B, C and D because we’d funded them for the same purpose and now we have data from all these different States and then we have this unique piece of software that can be utilized by any agency that has the criteria and the credentials to do first off, before they can even access the data, they have to pass an audit process, so that that means, no one can simply just go into this database and pull up a license plate. You know, if a Law Enforcement Agent such as a police officer were to type in his girlfriend’s, ex-girlfriend’s license plate into his on board, David day, David database and that ever came to like where he could not justify that looked up, that’s an internal investigation manner and it should be. He’s abusing his authority, but that’s not the case here. If we have the authority and we’ve gone through the process and we’ve gathered the data in a correct manner, then we set up an audit process. Once the audit process is detailed and we have certified that the individual looking at this data has the ability to look at the data, the next step is we utilize the analytics that we put together. Has this vehicle, you know, shown unusual behavior, what do I mean by that?

Chuck: Well that’s a good, let’s back up and restate that. Has the vehicle shown an unusual behavior, because I don’t know whose driving it?

John C.: Exactly.

Chuck: I don’t what color you are, I don’t know what race you are, I don’t know what your political affiliation is. I just know, a car has shown up and that’s, that’s a secret people have to zoom in on that this is not about people it’s about cars and then we go get the legal things we need to make it about people. That’s the secret.

John C.: Exactly. We do not profile.

Chuck: That’s right.

John C.: I am against profiling. LPR is not profiling, it is looking at a license plate, LPR is randomly at any point in a video image where a system may be deployed and I’m not looking at the person in the car, I’m looking on a license plate. Now that plate appears on a database and that’s one issue, if that license plate appears on a unique type of analytic look up where say, this car has appeared at a nuclear processing plant, has appeared at the Port of Tampa, the largest shipper of Nitrate fertilizers in the Southeast in not the US and then it has appeared at the Desalination plant of Tampa, within a week’s time or a three-day period of time, well then…

Chuck: We got a problem.

John C.: I have a question. Why is a car randomly showing up at these secured
locations? It’s not something I do.

Chuck: He is not the paper boy. It’s not the paper boy. There’s a problem with
that and I…

John C.: And you should look at it further.

Chuck: Absolutely.

John C.: So LPR gives them the ability to look at okay, we’ve identified this vehicle. It’s shown abnormal behavior. We have the audit processes in place to justify the lookup. Now let’s look up and see who this car is registered to and what happens if it’s registered to somebody that Department of Homeland Security may have on a watch list as a terrorist are you concerned at that point or do I…?

Chuck: Well I here, let’s stop right there, because here’s, here’s where it can go bad, right? Because just a fact they were gathering license plates and looking at the plates and the behavior of the car, the pattern of the car in other words the car is engaged in some sort of surveillance activity that is really not a privacy issue and I’m not a lawyer and Travis, have I ever played a lawyer on the show? I don’t think so, no, but so, but seriously it’s not a privacy issue because it’s about the car in itself, but if the federal government takes it that they can make it all [indiscernible] [0:44:57] because now they have people on watch list and they’re not supposed to be on watch list and so on and so on. That’s a separate issue; we shouldn’t throw the license plate out with the bathwater because the government doesn’t know how to maintain data on their side on the back end, right. People get on watch list for airplanes, they get the wrong names their databases aren’t updated. Those are separate issues and I, and I think people need to separate that from the behavior of the government and if we can, we can find amazing things and behavior with cars because people out there.

John C.: You are absolutely right, you know, you hit the, you hit the ball out of the ballpark here, because, you know, our current administration seems to believe that we’re over the ISIS crisis that we got them on the run. You know, we got them down from $80 million dollars in oil revenue down to $47 million. Well, Jesus that makes them one of the most well funded terrorist groups ever to exist on this planet. You know, what can; you do with $47 million. Let me tell you what you can with $47 million. In the last year, in Iraq, a device
containing iridium 194, which is an isotope, radioactive isotope which can easily be converted into a dirty bomb material was stolen in Iraq. It is never been identified as being reclaimed or found. In Mexico, in the last month, a similar device containing the same type of material has disappeared and has not been found. Where is this material? I can give you a guess and you know, a lot of what I say is conjecture to some people, lot of it is based on factual information based of off, you know, DHS’s websites and newsletters from various
agencies, but the fact is, the same device was stolen in Mexico in the last month. Now you have to ask yourself, who could steal a device like that and actually get away with it? First off, why would you want to steal nuclear material because for the average thief, what are you going to do with it, who do you find to buy a nuclear material I want to, roles on market.

You know arms market first off and even in that case chances are you’re going to get caught immediately because of the watch list out there, but we do know ISIS has two strongholds. We know that not only has Al-Qaeda, but Hamas has taught the north terrorists and probably going to get myself in trouble here with these guys and you know, it’s not going to be the first time, but again, you know, people think I talk about this, because, you know, I’m a, you know, die hard and I want all this stuff, but you know, I, every time I talk about it, I take a risk of making somebody angry and the fact is, the only people capable of handling this material are sophisticated individuals that have a lot of money, so you handle the material to bring in the right scientific team to take their
material to take it and take it out of the waste containers, to put it into other containers to weaponize it. How difficult is it to weaponize? I can’t tell you that I’m not a scientist, but being an average individual, with average intellect as I say I am. You know, we know the bombs that were used in, you know, Brussels, we know the bombs used in other areas by Al-Qaeda, the, you know, the, the bomb used in the Boston Marathon bombs were pressure cooker bombs. They are they are traditional Al-Qaeda alternative bombs.

They’re inexpensive to make, you can go to your hardware store spend $15, go to a local gun store buy some gun powder, go to your local hardware store and buy some nails and you have basically a device that’s capable of causing a devastation that Boston Marathon did. It’s not that sophisticated, so instead of adding in ball bearings and nails we had some of this material and we dump it in Downtown Phoenix or Downtown Houston, no one is any wiser because these individuals ISIS is so much smarter than we give them credit for and I think it’s doing us a disservice, when this administration doesn’t admit the fact that
they have learned how to circumvent our traditional methodologies of communication. They, they’re not communicating via email and they are not come, communicating via their text messaging or by their Apple phone, why? You know, we know that the FBI once you Apple and asked to open its code to them, Apple refused to allow them to see how they can access the code. The FBI had already cracked it and gathered the information on San Bernardino that it needed for an investigation. We knew they did that they said they did that. When ISIS when, you know, and Chuck correct me if I’m wrong here, but you should probably know this question as well, but I believe there was a threat against Twitter and against Facebook about if they should try to limit somebody’s access to their
sites that they would potentially bring those sites down.

Chuck: Well there was, I believe, yeah there were threats against the founders of those organizations, and personal threats as well I believe too, absolutely.

John C.: Yes, and actually, you know, they put up videos for 20 minutes in which, these companies couldn’t control their own sites, so actually, yeah, they have caused these sites to come down and cause great devastation and…

Chuck: Let me switch gear on something real quick, all right, so you mentioned the companies we’re talking about Facebook, Twitter they have issues. We are discussing this kind of in the realm of License Plate Recognition for governments, for agencies, police that kind of thing, but really there’s absolutely, correct me; if I’m wrong, okay. There is no reason that the Costco in Burbank can buy your software, stick it on the cameras and watch cars going in and out of Costco all day and use that data not connected to the police department, Costco is not going to hook into the police database, but maybe Costco is going to see your license plate that shows some kind of pattern, right? And there, there’s a value in the private sector for this and how it been utilized in a private sector, besides, you know, homeowners associations and things, really controlling parking, but are people use in a private sector and big corporations for intelligence gathering?

John C.: You know are they gathering to find out who their retail shoppers are and are they gathering into, you know, it’s been put out there that they’re trying to do that but, you know, it’s really pretty far-fetched, because of the amount of additional research. They can tell if a car has been in their lot five times in the last week, well this is a great shopper he is coming, maybe we should change or, you know, specials to days when we don’t have that much traffic, so the data can be used in some ways, but can they actually go and determining who is that person and send them a mail and say, we’re giving you a 10%.

Chuck: No, no, they can’t do that.

John C.: No, they can’t.

Chuck: No, but what I’m saying is what they could do, is they could use that data and you look at some data mining and decide, you know, this behavior equals something that we should look at for possible criminal behavior, in other words the car is showing up after hours, right?

John C.: Exactly and that could be…

Chuck: License plate. Then they call the local PD and they say I have some data; I got a car that shows up after hours every Tuesday and Thursday, goes behind my building parts and sits there. Can you guys look into it? I don’t see anyproblem with that. You just…

John C.: In reality there shouldn’t be, because again, you know, we are citizens of the same country we’re a homogonous group of individuals that, you know, we all want the best. You know, we also, we all look at our children; we want the best for them. Even, you know, I’ve often spoken about how badly I feel for Muslims of a different sect than the ISIS sect, which we know they’re being, you know discriminated against by not only ISIS, but by individuals that now look at these and say, oh God you’re potentially, you know, terrorist. It’s not fair to them but, you know, ISIS isn’t concerned about that. ISIS isn’t concerned about showing you a seven year old child putting a gun to the back of the head of a soldier, pulling the trigger and then holding that head up after it’s been severed and laughing with their parents, and saying what a good little solider he is or they aren’t laughing about, you know, they are laughing about our Christian children’s playground in Syria in which, you know, our news stations here refuse to show this stuff and it appalls me, but if you’ve ever seen an image of it, it was nothing more than the stakes planted in the ground with a sign saying Christian Children’s Playground with the heads of children, babies.

You know, to five-year olds cut off and stuck on states with people laughing at this thinking it is funny that Christians are being treated as badly. We know ISIS has used WMDs, you know, of the non-radiological type, they’ve used mustard gas. The same reason we took Saddam Hussein out they are doing it right now and we all, we think we can go onto these countries, and I don’t think we quite understand it yet that we can’t go into Iraq, we can’t go into Afghanistan, and we can’t into Iran and change 5,000 years of thinking by trying to impose our will on them and if by doing so, means we have to commit more troops and more of our soldiers that come back here that have to come back to a world that they’re
no longer adapted to and you know, it breaks my heart when I meet these soldiers, and when I speak to them, you know, they seem normal on the outside, they seem normal when you’re talking to them, expect when you catch them staring off into space and they are cringing, their faces are showing emotions that people normally don’t show.

They’re reliving things that we shouldn’t have to, you know, make people live in, and you know, but we’re heading in that direction again. You know, the Secretary of Defense and the Four Star undersecretary just got off, you know, the news junket, what three weeks ago and said it’s going to take six years and it’s going to take the commitment of massive amount of troops in these countries, when is it going to stop? You know, so what I’m advocating here is, we’ve developed and again we’ve gotten away from the subject of LPR. We’ve developed the most sophisticated branch of LPR. It is not only the most sophisticated branch, but it is the most affordable product out there for deployment in mass numbers, we on average or less than a quarter of our nearest competitor’s price, including equipment on average, if you have to buy equipment. In most cases it’s just a matter of tying the software to your existing cameras.

Chuck: Right, that’s the key. Existing cameras let me ask you a quick question. My, one of my Facebook people just wrote a note here. We’ve got about what three minutes, Travis, or three minutes left and she says, you know, what if we put this in place like downtown Portland and there is lot of pre-school and kindergartens down there and day care settings and you know, could the bad guys avoid being detected by just getting out of the cars and walking around and Christy, I’m going to tell you, yes, except no, because their license plate will still be captured coming into the area parking, it will be captured on some city
cameras somewhere or camera or a drugstore or something like that and then even if the car is parked, if the car keeps showing up there’s a pattern, we’re going to find it in the database do an analysis and say maybe we should find this car and take a look at it, so I think you could get, response to that to say, hey, the same car keeps come in and parking, come in and parking and come in and parking every…

John C.: Absolutely, and even, you know, again individuals we can associate one individual to one car or ten cars to one individual or ten individuals to one car. The databases really don’t care. It is, all we’re looking at is as a plate and then we’re associating it to abstract acts that occurred elsewhere under different circumstances, and then we pull them together and we analyze it and we look for the commonalities. Once we have the commonalities we can lock down upon them. Now, you know, was Christy that asked the question?

Chuck: Yeah.

John C.: Oh, Christy, I would you say to you try to imagine yourself going from your home wherever you live, and trying to get to a place maybe four miles away, three miles away. How many intersections do you have to go through? How many intersections would you have to try to avoid to try to get around the system, because the beautiful thing about city intersection cameras and city surveillance systems, you never know which camera may have LPR in it and you may never know, which ones are active or non-active, because the human mind, you know, we don’t perceive the cameras as we’re driving through intersections anymore. Once we have seen them once or twice, they are gone, but the problem is Law Enforcement vehicles, when you drive around with four cameras on the back of Law Enforcement vehicles with some systems from some companies being small, you know pretty concise systems. Our systems are always covert. You can never see our systems; they are not visible from the outside of the car. They are covert and they stay covert for the reason of, if I know this police car has LPR, because I’m in the business perhaps, but because I do the research. I know there is a way of defeating those systems.

Chuck: Hey John, we ran out of time. You got to come back and do some more, maybe we have you on another week to give us some updates. Give us your website.

John C.: It’s www.platesmart.com and again, you know, I would emphasize that if you have a chance please take a look at the website, please take a look at the opportunity this technology provides us in fighting this threat against ISIS and against on our own home grown terrorist groups that would see harm brought to the masses to push forward an ideology that we certainly don’t agreed with.

Chuck: Right. John thanks for coming in and…

John C.: Thank you so much, Chuck.

Chuck: Go to YouTube and check out the YouTube from ISC West that gives some more technical information about platesmart.com and tune in next week on
Security Guy Radio.

NINJIO attacks end user Security Awareness in a different way. We don’t lecture your users. We entertain and educate them by telling stories about real life security breaches that have happened to real life companies. We do this using 3-4 minute long animated and gamified episodes written by Hollywood writers, and we focus on a teachable moment around a specific type of attack. A new episode is released every 30 days. It’s like “drip marketing” for Security Awareness.

Training by Storytelling Think back to your college years. Are you more likely to remember a two-hour movie that you saw, or a two-hour lecture that you sat through?

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Storytelling creates memories more powerfully than any other method of learning. At NINJIO the story is everything. The story creates memories, and memories solidify retention. Retention turns into action.

Combine our storytelling with real-life breaches that have happened in real-life companies, and you’ve got a formula for truly changing your Security Culture.

NINJIO is training that actually works.

Chuck Harold & Guests

Zack Zchuler Ninjio.com

Eve Cerda @SimplyE3

Cherise GutierrezCyberThreatBeGone.com

Paul Bristow SecurityGuyRadio.com

Chuck HaroldThe Security Guy

Full text of radio show

Please forgive any typos, this podcast was transcribed by my typing pool comprised of volunteer stalkers.

Chuck: Welcome to an animated version, Security Guy Radio with my co, I have
two, two co-hosts today. Mr. Paul Bristow, Eve Cerda.

Paul B:Yes.

Chuck:Back in the studio, good for you.

Paul B: Yeah. Wearing my Tisco [phonetic] [0:00:09] shirt and tie.

Chuck: Now can we get a shot of Paul with his tie? That is so British. No, yeah
[crosstalk] [0:00:17]

Paul B: It’s out of the box see.

Chuck: That hurts my eyes.

Paul B: You got to dress; dress out of the box, so people will notice you.

Chuck: I’m serious; this is a very British thing.

Eve C.:He’s starting a new trend. This is
okay. This can happen.

Chuck: No, it’s not, it’s not okay [crosstalk] [0:00:27]…

Paul B: It’s called fashion.

Eve C.: He can do it. He can do, he’s British.

Chuck: I’m going to go over budget and buy one of the Security Guy Radio shirts, because I can’t look at that, it hurts my eyes [crosstalk] [0:00:34]…

Paul B: Well, as long as it’s got cufflinks.

Chuck: I’ll give you cufflinks.

Paul B: Yeah, give me the cufflinks.

Chuck: I’ll get you gold plated cufflinks as long as you don’t wear stripes and horizontals in the same shirt, and then with the background for you being it must look really, really bad.

Paul B: What about stripes? There is just kind of different ways.

Chuck: Okay, all right. Oh, did I tell you, oh wait a minute you didn’t see my Facebook thing about the, I was at my son’s graduation this week.

Paul B: No, I was watching it. I was watching it on the Facebook.

Chuck: Yeah, getting a degree in math, right. So, Mr. Jarvis, he didn’t know this, so he goes up on the stage and we’re filming it and before we went up there the professor had pronounced all these very difficult names, you know“Bing Jong Pung Julule” and “Ninjen” and all of these foreign names he’s pronouncing them perfectly. He gets to Max Harold and he says, “Maximilian Herald” I’ve never heard my name…

Paul B: Well, that was probably the way it was said in the day, Ha-ruled
[crosstalk] [0:01:21]

Chuck: I think that’s what he was saying Maximilian something…

Cherise:I think that’s a very creative way
to say your last name.

Chuck: Some ancient name, I, he was, he didn’t catch it, he didn’t care, but it was just kind of funny. I’ve never since Howard, Hubbard, you all kinds of these but Ha-ruled, so welcome Chuck Ha-ruled, Security Guy Radio. I’m going to go with that from now on. It’s easier to say. Cyber girl what’s going on, how you’ve been?

Cherise: Hi, well thank you for having me on tonight again as usual. Well, we all know Barbie and the creator Mattel, the largest toy maker, everybody knows. Well, right now Mattel is battling China, because yes even Barbie gets hacked. Mattel unfortunately was a victim of a huge phishing scam that resulted in a $3 million wire transferred to a small little town in China.

Chuck: Why, what? Our friend Brian used to be the security there, I guess he should be back then.

Cherise: So, Mattel has a huge interest in China because they do a lot of their manufacturing of their Barbie dolls and toys. Well, they recently underwent major executive changes, specifically speaking, a turnover in the CEO seat, so a month in to fill in the new position of CEO. Their Finance Director wanted to ensure and impress the CEO with staying on top of financial obligations and payments with vendors and so this suspicious email came in one day requesting for a remittance of $3 million dollars to a new Chinese vendor.

Chuck: Were they selling, were they selling toner cartridges, because that’s…

Cherise: Toner cartridges? No.

Chuck: That’s the old scam. No I’m serious, remember Paul; we used to get a fax back in the day it said, “Hey…

Paul B: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Chuck: Your toner cartridge bill was due and we had people at our guard company, three different divisions around the country sent in checks for $2500 and they called me up and said, “Did you get one of these I said, Yeah, it’s a scam. It’s out of North [indiscernible] [0:03:13] what you’re doing?

Paul B: How do you remember that? That must be 25 years ago.

Chuck: Still [indiscernible] [0:03:20] well I’m only half kidding, but explain how, I understand the phishing tact, but explain to my nieces and nephews how somebody could be so, what’s a good word “Stupid” to do that [crosstalk] [0:03:29] I mean if it’s 300 bucks.

Cherise: You know, I wouldn’t even think stupid, I wouldn’t even say stupid because when you’re dealing with certain executives they have certain levels of let’s call it allowances that they have permission to sign for and this Finance Director obviously was in the millions and so they had, she had authorization to go ahead and remit that type of payment. The challenge is that the email came posing from her CEO and so she didn’t think twice about just obliging and making the payment and when she confirmed with the new CEO that she had completed his request as, as requested, the CEO is “What are you talking about? I didn’t order a; three million payment to China.”

Chuck: Now why didn’t this…

Paul B: That was pretty clever isn’t it?

Chuck: It is clever. Well, remember when they, they hacked the news CoreSite back in ’99 and they copied the news CoreSite and every time you send an email, you’re thinking it was going to Mr. Murdoch [crosstalk] [0:04:18] it actually went to China. Now Cherise, why wasn’t this something catch, caught under Sarbanes-Oxley? Because don’t you have to have two signatures for these kind of things?

Cherise: It depends what level I mean CEOs, Finance Directors usually have the supreme authority to, to do certain allocated amounts of remittance and so in this term, in this case there was no let’s say due diligence perhaps or authorization of confirmation and that can be typical at the executive level because who else are they going to go up one, especially if they have the final authority to remit payments of that amount, but what I’d like to note here is we actually have a happy ending. Typically when these types of phishing scam happen, you don’t get your money back, well because Mattel had such a large, has
such a large presence in China, they sent their Anti-Fraud Executive to the actual bank for which, processed the money, which is a small town in China called, I’ll make sure I try not to butcher the name Wenzhou, which is predominantly known as a criminal hub for stolen funds.

Well, since they had boots on the ground so to speak in China and they had strong relationships with the FBI and China, the Chinese government, they were able to confirm the transfer took place at that particular bank and actually get a warrant from the FBI to actually have funds paid back, so this is actually a case where you see a phishing scam go awry and they actually get their money back.

Chuck: Well let me translate that for our listeners on basic terms. What happened was the Red Army came in and pointed a gun and the bank manager said — no, I’m not kidding. That’s exactly what happened, right and said, put the money back, because that’s what happens. We, when I was at Disney building, we were building Disney, China. You know, I forgot the, what Mainland it was on, but in Red China, now Taiwan, right and they called me up and say, “Oh, these guys came in with guns and little red hats and they took all our computers and left what we do?” I said, “You do nothing. You don’t do a thing. You don’t argue with them. You know, the army came in and took all the computers, we never got them back, never got a phone call, nothing ever happened right. So, I’m sure that’s what happened, but that is kind of a happy ending that, that they went their way, because they don’t want to ruin the toy manufacturing contract, you know?

Cherise: Absolutely not in that really relationship.

Chuck: I’m sure somebody was executed for that [crosstalk] [0:06:38]…

Paul B: The more you think about it now, Mattel must have a, an authorization process for that one woman to be able to authorize [crosstalk] [0:06:46]

Chuck: But, that’s wrong. That’s too much. It’s wrong.

Paul B: …that $3 million check it’s ridiculous. Isn’t it?

Chuck: Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense.

Eve: No, no, no, no. See what happens when you, when you’re dealing with a company this big is that she probably has to sign like 20 things in like one minute, every other minute, you know so she doesn’t have time to necessarily look at everything although that is her job. She probably thought that somebody else looked at it before.

Chuck: That’s very interesting.

Cherise: But what happens in phishing scams is that most people are unsuspecting of any kind of malicious intent when they’re receiving emails especially if they’re crafted very well in such a way that they look authentic. That’s the case for which, we’re going to talk about next and that is the rise in phishing attacks in terms of taxpayers and their information as we know the tax season has just closed, but there has been reportedly over 40 organizations in Q1 that have reported data theft in terms of W-2 information, due to phishing scams.

Chuck: Wow. Well, I got a phone call from the IRS and I’m being sued by them.

Paul B: Oh, I read that one.

Chuck: I said [crosstalk] [0:07:49] tick a number right.

Paul B: I’ve read that three times, actually.

Chuck: Yeah that’s a big one going around too.

Zack S.: You know who the biggest, biggest one that just happened, W-2. I’m
sorry, yeah; W-2 business email compromise was sprouts..

Cherise: Oh, wow.

Zack S.: …from this market, 10,000 records.

Chuck: Oh.

Cherise: Jeez.

Chuck: Cherise?

Cherise: Yeah and so and that’s a good point, you know, you have in the thousands records of these individuals information being stolen and I’m talking social security numbers and, information that you would typically find on a W-2 and one is thinking to themselves forty organizations that are, or have now disclosed being comp, being phished, just within Q1 alone of this year. You have to ask yourself, “How is this happening?” What is it that let’s say the employees may or may not be doing correctly to do a due diligence, to ask, you know and confirm the identity of individuals asking for information via email.

Paul B.: Now at least, is this employee information getting out or customers?

Cherise: Yes, employee information [crosstalk] [0:08:50]…

Paul B.: It’s employee okay.

Chuck: Now is this on the rise, is this, worse than last year, it keeps going
up?

Cherise: It is. It does keep going up and actually there has been a rise in phishing scams, specifically even Spear phishing, which is where we’ve discussed in the past on this show the top — who the target is…

Chuck: Now was this Spear phishing for Mattel?

Cherise: The Spear, so actually Mattel, it turns out that they were compromised through a phishing campaign, corporate emails were, were used to gather information on the target, as well as social media, that allowed these cyber criminals to craft a particular phishing email or campaign that really targets an individual specifically, so that it looks authentic.

Chuck: Now the fact that they spilled Mattel, metal, didn’t tip anybody off, oh I see those, I see these things. You get these emails right. They spell Bank of America wrong I mean, really you guys, I mean.

Paul B: But these guys must have done a lot of research.

Cherise: Yeah.

Chuck: But, most of those things will have misspelling, typos, you know, I
mean…

Paul B: But actually it’s evolving [crosstalk] [0:09:52]

Cherise: But, you know, you would think it’s common sense, but in all reality most organizations suffer from some type of Cyber Security Awareness.

Chuck: Well, it’s funny you should mention that, as always we just happen to have a guest in our studio. Isn’t it amazing? It’s miraculous almost. Jarvis, are you impressed again. That we happen to a guest just happens to be sitting here to talk about that. Welcome Zack Schuler of ninjio.com. Now Zack your wife called me, or contacted me on LinkedIn, and she said would you look at our product now and I looked at that and I said, this is fascinating, so what NINJIO does is make training films, well, training animation videos, short animation videos to teach people and raise awareness for cyber security, so welcome to the show, Zack. Glad to have you.

Zack S.: Thank you for having me, thanks. It’s great to be here.

Chuck: Does Zack get an applause today? [Applause] No, there we go okay.

Cherise: Little delayed.

Chuck: Now, I really, sincerely I thought this is a very cool idea, right and we talked about this before the show, so Security Guy Radio is a little long in the tooth, okay. Both age and we talk a long time we go for an hour, but I might shorten that, and the reason I may shorten it is because people short attention spans are shorter and shorter every day. So, when I saw that these are about four minutes or so. I thought that’s going to make an impact, so give me some background, your background where you came from, you have an IT background, how you got into this idea. I think it’s really cool.

Zack S.: Sure, well again thanks for having me. So, yeah, my background is in IT, I started off as a network engineer, at a pretty young age I started a business called Cal Net Technology Group, IT systems provider, Managed Service Provider based out of Los Angeles. Currently have just over a 100 employees, started that business at the age of 21, got busy, hired a guy, got busy I hired another guy grew it to about 85 to 86 employees when I sold the business in 2013.

Chuck: How long you had the business, like 20 years.

Zack S.: I had the business for 18 years.

Chuck: That’s unusual start to start that type of business back in the day.

Zack S.: Oh, its Windows 95 had just come out. So it was 1995 when I started the business and so a lot of people, the business actually started out of Circuit City, so I was selling computers, people would say, can you come to my home, set up my computer for me, show me how to use it, so I started doing that. I got myself to college then I graduated from Cal State, Northridge and then from there I went to a trade school to learn how to do computer networking and you know, started doing that, so it really started with the Windows 95 era, kind of the first home, or the first PC in the home and that’s when businesses are really computerizing themselves as well.

Paul B: I bet, as people to listen, they wouldn’t even know what Circuit City
was.

Chuck: I think there is one sitting right here.

Cherise: I know what Circuit City is. [Crosstalk 0:12:35]

Zack S.: I gave a speech to an eighth grade class today, and I said raise your hand if you’ve heard of Circuit City and there wasn’t a hand that went up and I said it’s kind of like the Best Buy.

Chuck: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. Now where is the spark that kind of came up with this putting what you did in the past with this idea for NINJIO…?

Zack S.: Yeah, well so, here is what’s crazy is that, in my old business we were tech guys, right. We were putting in these crazy firewalls and just all this really good security stuff and the company still does that, but I would walk through our security operations, our network operations center and we would have clients who would get hacked. I would say well how did this happen, we spend all this money securing them and the comment was well, Suzy clicked on something stupid, but it wasn’t something stupid it was SS click, Suzy clicked on stupid stuff. Right and so I was like, you know, it’s nuts like people have to understand what they’re doing and I didn’t, at that point in time, say well let me start a training business right, I was running a tech business, so sold the business, I think I was going to retire, play golf for two weeks in a row, got worse every round, we talked a little bit about this, and then about a year or so ago, a light bulb went off and I said, you know, it would be so cool if people actually knew what they were doing and they, and hackers weren’t hacking people anymore, and that’s the saying on our website is “hackers don’t hack
systems, hackers hack people” [crosstalk] [0:14:08].

Chuck: You know that’s what I said, that’s true. It’s a good point.

Zack S.: And that’s what…

Cherise: People are the weakest link.

Zack S.: People are the weakest link. For sure and that’s what’s going on today, and it’s getting worse and worse and worse, and so what I did was I thought back to all my times, taking like sexual harassment training, or whatever other corporate training we had to deploy throughout our organization, and how many times I would start the video and then I would hit the minimize button on the video, and I’d go and do my work, and I’d listen for an audio cue to when they ask me a question and I hit next, and I was like there’s got to be a better way, so took out a blank canvas, and I said if I wanted to learn about security as your average everyday employee, which is really important that I know how would I want to learn about it. Well, I wanted it to be short, three to four minutes long, we are a Facebook and YouTube generation. We cannot consume content, you know much more — think about going through Facebook now, if the video it’s a five minutes long, “I’m not watching that.” It’s just how it is, so has to be short, has to be frequent.

Security is one of those things that most corporations train their employees on it once a year, but the threats change once an hour, so if you think about how backwards that is, and so I’m like, okay it’s got to be current, it’s got to be relevant, it’s got to be on the attacks that are happening today and so we said, let’s do three to four minute long animated episodes and base them on real actual security breaches that have actually happened to real companies.

Chuck: That’s good. People put the connection in the brain, that’s great.

Zack S.: Correct and then they say,”Oh, not only is this interesting,” because I heard about this on the news, but “Oh, this can happen to me, this isn’t science fiction” and so I had a, or have a good friend from college, he was an RTVF major, actually, maybe he wasn’t, I don’t remember what he was. He was a one of this…

Cherise: He is one of this R majors…

Zack S.: He is one of those guys, anyways. He was a Forensic Sheriff for the Sheriff’s Department, and he ended up writing for Hawaii Five-0 and CSI, the guy’s name is Bill Haynes and so I went to Bill and I said, approached Bill with this idea, this is probably July, August somewhere around there and Bill is like, “I don’t know it sounds like a good idea” you can probably sell it, if anybody you can, and so he is the guy that writes the content, he writes the episodes. The episodes are written by you know, real Hollywood writers. Then I went and…

Chuck: He was a sheriff too.

Zack S.: He was a sheriff, yeah.

Chuck: [Indiscernible] [0:16:34] a cop, that’s great.

Zack S.: Exactly and then went out and found an animator and basically took our first episode and went out to a bunch of different animators, and said basically compete I paid all of them. A guy named Ben Reynolds just crushed it with the animation, Ben works for me today, he is amazing and then you know we got, we’re actually as we speak we’re recording episode seven in some voice studio in Studio City, so we have professional voice actors, we have professional music scoring, we bring it all together for this three to four minute long animated episode that focuses on one very specific attack vector like Spear phishing, and it focuses on one very specific actual security breach that’s happened.

Chuck: Now, just happen to bring one of those tapes with us, we’re going to take a look right here. Right, Jarvis, if you’re listening to this there’s narration behind this, but you got to watch us on YouTube or go to ninjio.com and look at the video there. Go ahead Jarvis; just roll that, that video.

[Video] [0:17:46]

Speaker:And you think his answer was hack the studio, who made the movie. I’m still having trouble buying it.

Speaker: Pretty obvious to me a copy of our movies leaks it gets a hold of it and decides to shut us down the only way he knows how for those Spear phishing cyber-attack.

Speaker: How much time is left?

Speaker: Whoever it was, they are smart. Make sure they gave us just enough time to not be able to do anything.

Speaker: Did you speak to Janine?

Speaker: As the Chief Security Officer it’s my job to inform you of a breach.

Speaker: I just can’t believe. I fell for it. I mean that. I’m really careful.

Speaker: That’s part of what makes Spear phishing so effective. Do you remember
getting an email from IT requesting you to click on a link for some new HR
software?

Speaker: Here is the email I got from what I thought was our company’s IT department. Notice the email address, well the front portion say Sunny Pictures IT. If you look at the actual email address its coming Sunny Dash Pictures.com not our standard SunnyPictures.com also look at how bad the grammar is. Like most IT departments ours is very careful about proofing emails for grammar. It’s also unusual that it was sent at 3:45 a.m. What tricked me was the fact that this email was talking about HR software. I’m in the HR department so it made sense that it would come to me, but what I learned from our Chief Security Officer is that this is the very essence of a Spear phishing attack.

Speaker: Well hackers did their homework on you. Perhaps on LinkedIn or some
other social media site. They learned you work in our HR department so an email
mentioning HR is what they sent to you.

Speaker: By opening the attached excel spread sheet, an Adobe Flash vulnerability was executed and opened a back door for the hackers to gain access to our company’s entire network. I, I don’t know what to say other than I’m sorry, and am I going to lose my job over this? Did you tell are we all might lose our jobs over this?

Speaker: Here we go, cross your fingers, this was just a hoax. Oh, geez.

Speaker: Oh what’s going on, what are these files?

Speaker: They’re everything.

Speaker: What? And who is going to have access to them?

Speaker: Everyone.

Speaker: I need to call the parent company. Tell them what’s going on.

Speaker: What are the clues that should have tipped Janine off that this wasn’t
a legitimate email?

[End] [0:20:24]

Chuck: Oh, that’s really good.

Paul B: That’s brilliant.

Chuck: I think, I think we should go to our women on the street for an opinion on that phrasing whenever that wasn’t the right way to say, that was, but I, you do watch cartoons on Saturday morning in your Star Wars pajamas and your [crosstalk] [0:20:36]

Eve C.: Absolutely.

Chuck: So, as a cartoon enthusiast, aficionado how did this appeal to you?

Eve C.: I actually really liked that I was very into it, so that’s very good.

Chuck: Well and you’re the generation with the short attention span, so that’s…

Eve C.: Yeah, so this is good…

Chuck: So, this helped you for four minutes? Did you…

Eve C.: Four minutes.

Chuck: Did you want to see more?

Eve C.: Yes. I do want to see more.

Chuck: What might you want to see after that? I mean, like more answers or more in-depth descriptions or what?

Eve C.: Well, I just like the videos in general. I mean I know I know you are supposed to do the questions after, but the videos are very entertaining.

Chuck: There was some, there were some dead air you can’t see on the video, but if you, if you’re on YouTube watching there was some check offs that were going click, click and answering some questions. I, Zack, I just think it’s great.

Cherise: I, I really enjoyed watching it too because what I really appreciate about the approach as you take really technical concepts and you simplify them down for a very easy digestible way of understanding a technical complex issue.

Chuck: Now Cherise did you notice that the, the guy with the deep cop voice and the girl weren’t; they’re similar to Security Guy and a Cyber Girl. I could see, I could see Security guy, Cyber girl cartoon, Jarvis am I right.

Jarvis: Yeah.

Chuck: Okay all right, very good.

Cherise: Would love for that to happen.

Chuck: Zack, we may contact you after that to do a little Security Guy promo video. That was very well done, very well done.

Zack S.: Well, thanks.

Chuck: All right, so let’s talk about what other types of cyber education, you’re going to be approaching in the future. You’ve done about eight videos so far.

Zack S.: So, we just voice recorded tonight, episode seven. The first video was on the Chrysler Jeep Attack that was actually done by an ethical hacker and then, and there we teach about rogue USB security.

Chuck: Oh that was for the car?

Zack S.: Correct.

Chuck: The white hats are proving that they could, hack a car, yeah.

Zack S.: That’s right. That’s right.

Chuck: Oh, interesting, okay.

Zack S.: Yeah and so we, we, we use an attack vector being a being a rogue USB device, because what people, hackers will do, they’ll leave a USB device sitting on the front steps of a, of a big company sure enough the CEO, grab and, “I wonder what this. Plugs it in and bam they’re owned, so we did that, we did the episode two and three were on the Ashley Madison Breach. That was a,

Cherise: Oh, awesome.

Zack S.: That was an interesting one.

Chuck: Oh that’s a good one [crosstalk] [0:22:41]

Cherise: Now we put in a request, how about the Ukrainian Power Outage. I’d love to see that one.

Chuck: Oh, that happened in December that was a good one.

Paul B: Yeah, tell us about the Ashley Madison [crosstalk] [0:22:51]

Chuck: Well, Paul’s concerned his emails.

Zack S.: Well, yeah, there is a [crosstalk] [0:22:55] or do we want to talk about that or [crosstalk] [0:22:57]. Do we want to talk about that one, with you on the Air? Are you sure? Okay. Okay.

Paul B.: Because I’ve got friends.

Zack S.: Okay, okay. Yeah, so the Ashley Madison Breach, the, the company that owns the site, they are based out of Canada and every email address that was ever associated with that site became public information. It was a really hard episode for us to do, especially for Bill the writer because every other company that we do an episode on like Sony, you feel bad for them. They’re breached and you feel bad for them, Ashley Madison, not so much.

Chuck: Well, yeah.

Zack S.: You didn’t exactly feel bad for them. So we had to create this really cool story with this Fortune 500 CEO has his identity stolen, through social media, so he was engineered through a social media, had his identity stolen, that was taken. They created a profile on Ashley Madison then they anonymously tipped off his wife. His wife found the profile on Ashley Madison, she walks out with baby in hand, while they’re doing like this live interview on him then it’s, it’s a great, it’s a great story. It’s a two-part-er.

Chuck: And you’ve just given every CEO in the country an, an excuse now and nowwhat [crosstalk] [0:24:02]

Zack S.: Well, so that’s right and so that…

Chuck: I’m sure that’s been used.

Zack S.: That’s exactly right and the whole point of the hack in the story was that the hacker wanted to bring down Fortune 500 CEOs. He was a Hacktivist, right he wasn’t doing it for money, just trying to bring people down.

Paul B.: Now is there a way to Chuck and stop his email getting out from that
site?

Zack S.: No.

Paul B.: No.

Zack S.: No it’s too late.

Chuck: Okay, okay. How about, how about your flash drives full of porn do you want to start that? Really, come on.

Zack S.: So, another episode that we’re finishing animation on tomorrow is the Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital Ransomware Attack that was made public, I don’t know, six weeks or so ago and so that’s what’s really neat about our company, is that we can take something that has just happened. Write a story about it, animate it and push it out to our, to our customers.

Chuck: Give me, give me a, an idea of a timeline how, you know if, I hope, if it would happen if Security Guy Radio got hacked today, wouldn’t that be great? People are actually watching our show, how fast could you get a video out?

Zack S.: Well, I mention the Sprouts Farmers Market. That’s episode seven that was recorded tonight. Voice recording was done tonight; scriptwriting was done a week ago. So it’s a week to voice recording, animation will be done in two weeks, maybe three weeks, a week after that music scoring will be completely done, so you’re talking about a five week lag time between story to you know the entire episode to get into shop…

Chuck: Yeah, pretty fair, makes it timely. Yeah.

Zack S.: It makes it timely, yeah, yeah, for sure and by the time it hits the media, that everybody knows about it, you know it’s a, it’s right on play…

Chuck: Now tell us, for people who haven’t heard about the Hollywood
Presbyterian, tell us a little background what’s those hacks were you go through
your videos, you know.

Zack S.: Yeah, so, so you want the story?

Paul B.: Yeah, just…

Zack S.: Yeah. Okay, so Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital was a small hospital in Hollywood.

Chuck: It’s right down the street from…

Zack S.: Yeah, right here, and they had a Ransomware attack and you know the details of how the actual attack happened a lot of times people don’t talk about that, because they don’t want to show what they, like the vector was, but essentially, they contracted Ransom-ware across almost the entire organization and the, the original reporting of the story was at the, the threat act, the bad act, it’s threat actors, hackers whatever you want to call them wanted $3.7 million to unlock their machines, so they could use them again.

Paul B.: How did that get on their machines?

Zack S.: So, likely what happened was somebody just, just clicked on an email, and it said, you know, update this piece of software and they did it, and they got access to the machine and once they have access to that machine, they get in and then, they just, you know, go across the network and [crosstalk] [0:26:46]…

Paul B.: So, again it’s a physical action that started it…

Chuck: A person.

Zack S.: 99 times out of a 100 it is a person that starts it. Yes, so IBM reports that 95% of security breaches are due to human error.

Paul B.: [Indiscernible] [0:26:59] it’s all physical…

Chuck: You were seeing that back in the day, yeah.

Zack S.: What’s crazy now is when we talk about what’s called business email compromise scams, which are the wire fraud, the W-2 stuff that we’ve already talked about. Those, that, you don’t even have to be a hacker, so in, in Episode seven we’re talking about W-2 business email compromise we’re coining the term and it sounds really ugly, but it’s an ugly thing “scacker” and a scacker is half scam artists, half hacker.

Zack S.: Because you don’t need to be a hacker anymore, like all you have to do is spoof the email address of the CFO to the payroll processor and say, “Hey, I need these payroll records right away.” The payroll company gives them to you in one PDF file, they get released and that one PDF file gets into the hands of the wrong people, you get 10,000 tax returns filed and all of a sudden you are a worker and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, my tax return was filed on my behalf from some guy and wherever [crosstalk] [0:28:01] not the U S.

Chuck: I guess I was the scacker at one time, by myself.

Eve C.: Were you?

Chuck: I was I, unfortunately, by the way, my mother didn’t raise any dumb kids but, but I’m no genius. Okay, so let’s just say I had an incident and a business who may have a, let’s say borrowed one of my scripts that I wrote and so what I did is, I spoofed my, through Outlook, and you can go in Outlook and you can change the name as it appears you can change a bunch of things and I just put my name and it is the person who had stolen my script and I sent that email with somebody that was involved in the script stealing and they started talking to each other and I started whole conversation with them. This person thought that they were talking to that other person and I didn’t steal anything with information but back at the end, I said, “Thanks for meeting you just stole my script. Thanks a lot, right.

Eve C.: Did you sue him?

Chuck: I did not. I did not, but…

Zack S.: Did you beat him up?

Chuck: They, but they knew that I knew and by the way they did not make the film, they had started production with a major star and they didn’t, but not difficult to do and you know these are people at a studio. They’re not, you know they’re smart people and all they did is just look at the name, it said it’s from Chuck Harold and they said, “Oh yeah, I know Chuck Harold—email”, so this isn’t like you say, super sophisticated Russian spies doing the stuff anymore.

Zack S.: That’s right.

Chuck: It’s kind of basic stuff.

Zack S.: That’s right.

Chuck: Then if you’re smart, you know, you can click on view details and you can look at, you know where that came from loc, I think, but this is why I’m so passionate about these things. This has just been going on a long time, answering why it’s on the rise are people catching on to it, I mean, what’s, it’s just so easy to do now?

Zack S.: I think it’s just yeah, it’s just so easy to do and you know people don’t, you know, why rob a bank when you can just grab a computer and yeah, here’s the other thing that that happens. I was in FBI Conference couple of weeks ago and a buddy of mine is a special agent and he says that when something like a business email compromise crosses multiple jurisdictions across the US all of a sudden nobody is responsible and nobody will go after it and there’s so many of these things that are happening now like businesses every day are going out of business because they’ve been wire fraud, because the business email comprise wire fraud stuff, and there’s so much of it. It’s like you know he is like it’s just like, you know [crosstalk] [0:30:10] and it’s overwhelming.

Chuck: It’s like the terrorists. It takes about, what’s it Paul, 14 or 24? I
can’t remember. FBI just [crosstalk] [0:30:16]

Paul B: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Chuck: And we have hundreds of terrorists and we have 2000 FBI, that’s right, so
it’s just not possible [crosstalk] [0:30:23]

Zack S.: Well, yeah and we have millions of Scackers. So, how you are going to
follow those guys?

Chuck: Right. Now, Miss. Cherise you talked about Ransom-ware last week. What
case was that?

Cherise: Yeah. It was actually, we did, we discuss the Kentucky Hospital which is a very similar case to the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center and that’s basically where they just totally took down their system for several days, bringing down the hospital system for several days and it cripple, crippled any business, hospital much less jeopardize the patients that are there.

Chuck: Now here is, maybe I don’t know the background of this, but Hollywood Presbyterian it’s not a large hospital and I’m not sure if it’s part of one of the big mega hospital owners, but it’s always been kind of a clean look hospital. Not super sophisticated, right, somebody going to Saint John’s or UCLA or something. Do we know if they were successful in getting some money out of
them?

Zack S.: They were so. It was originally reported it was $3.7 million is what they were asking for it, but that was not correct reporting. There is like some Bitcoin to U S. dollar currency screw up there. Long story short, they got, they got just under $17,000 out of them to pay the Ransom.

Chuck: Yes, see Cherise you are saying last week, it well no, really not, see it’s like, it’s like the kidnap is a Mexico right. They kidnap you they call your brother-in-law who is at the hotel and say, give me $500 and we are done, because I can give you $500. Let’s do volume; let’s do 100 kidnappings today, all right. So, Cherise, it’s really these things are getting to be a lower point, entry point for the ransom money, because, “Hey, why I want to pay $1500 so I get everybody back to work [crosstalk] [0:31:58].

Paul B: Plus that I don’t report it, it’s only [crosstalk] [0:32:02].

Cherise: Exactly and there’s so many variants of different type of Ransomware that keep coming out onto the market, and the unsuspecting user that doesn’t confirm or clicks on those links, it just it takes seconds to be compromised, but so I want to get back to utilizing this approach of training to craft a certain message that’s easy for an employee that’s non-technical to understand and maybe think twice. Zack, talk to us about how companies can utilize your training awareness courses for their own purpose.

Zack S.: Yeah, so essentially the business model is, we sell this content to major companies. We sell it on a per user, per month basis. We hope that companies view it kind of as a rounding era; it’s really not that expensive, right.

Chuck: It’s very good.

Zack S.: So, the key in the business model is to get lots and lots of companies to buy it and that’s the key, because the more companies we have, you know, the more awareness that’s out there and so that’s essentially, we’ve got kind of two different ways that it can get delivered. It can be either be delivered through our cloud, through our own learning management system, which is where the, you know, smaller companies generally less than 2500 employees that’s how they would buy it, and then deliver it that way and then they can measure like who took, you know, who watched the episode, who didn’t when did they watch it, how long did it take them to complete the answer to the questions correctly.

Chuck: Okay. That’s very important.

Zack S.: Those are important stuff, so from a compliance standpoint they can track who did what, then for our larger customers…

Chuck: That’s on your cloud doing that?

Zack S.: Correct. For our larger customers we’ll just hand them what’s called a SCORM file, which is basically like a file that gets plugged into an internal learning management system, and then they plug it in and they can do all the measurement on their own.

Chuck: Now how do you protect the copyrights maybe not the best way to say, but in essence it’s intellectual property.

Zack S.: It is.

Chuck: Once it goes on the web it’s kind of like, you know, how do you trust the
client, not to say, let me email to my buddy and show it to them for free and
stuff. I like the way you that you give the file to the big corporations,
they’re going to protect it, internally.

Zack S.: Yeah, and I think it might be an issue, I mean you can watch what we just watched. It’s public on Vimeo right now and so we don’t release every episode that we do publicly, but ones where we just want to get people’s attention, you know, then we do it – because they take that and use it as training I suppose they could. It’s going to be the same problem that you have when you buy a piece of software, and that same piece of software makes its way on to 10 different computers. You know, it’s like you just hope that people are going to do the right thing and yeah and most of the time…

Cherise: Can you do custom training development not necessarily, you know, a storyline that’s happened, that’s played out in the public eye, but let’s say a corporation has specific need or a specific scenario.

Chuck: Oh that’s a good idea yeah, customized. If somebody hack the station, we are going to sit down and do internal training and help you write a script for them.

Zack S.: That’s right. We’re not doing that yet, that will be on the roadmap of the business at some point. It does cost you know, probably 15 grand an episode for us to produce one. So, it’s not you know an in-substantial and I think as the business grows we’ll actually go into different routes, we’ll probably do custom content for really large organizations. The other thing is getting into verticals, so maybe doing a whole thing that just deals with medical. You know, dealing with just PCI, PCI compliance.

Chuck: That’s a good idea.

Zack S.: Payment Card Industry. You know so go down into those sorts of
verticals, but right now we’re just trying to do one thing, and do it really,
really well and the content we make applies to so many different companies. I
mean Ransom-ware, yes, it’s big in the hospitals right now, but every company is
getting hit with Ransom-ware.

Chuck: Now, Cherise, how do hospitals get hit with this, with all their you know HIPAA regulations and being careful about this and I don’t think it seems like they’re the worst target right now.

Cherise: You know again typically Ransom-ware makes its way onto whether it’s a hospital computer, your home personal computer, corporate computer usually through the means of some kind of phishing attack, a link gets sent, they clicked on it and installs the malicious software on the back end of the host machine. You know we already seen too many claims of Ransom-ware being inserted through portable media like the description of the USB and picking it up off the street and so now that does happen, but typically the Ransom-ware that we’ve seen is usually coming through the means of phishing scams.

Chuck: You both have, you know, I will throw that to you, Zack. You both have technical questions and you can answer this. Why aren’t; the IT guys block in these things, checking them, I don’t know is there a some way, technically as a firewall thing or is it just?

Zack S.: Yeah. I mean you can’t. It’s, there’s a whole bunch of reasons why, but there is you know not every piece of software has the, even the ability to check and there is just, it’s really hard for you to put a technical solution in place sometimes. That fixes this. You got to educate the last mile on it.

Paul B: Well, I guess it’s a mixture and, because now, you know, most companies, you know, they are pulling up a scam emails.

Zack S.: Oh yeah, they try it.

Cherise: Absolutely.

Zack S.: They try, but I’m sorry there are literally 100 million phishing emails
that go out every day.

Eve C.: Wow.

Zack S.: It’s 100 million, so you made the analogy to a terrorist, right. A terrorist only has to be right once and so if you’re getting, if you know obviously one company is not getting a 100 million, but if you are getting 10,000 of these and you are filtering 99.9% of them. Great, but you know what. That means five get through. Whatever the number is, right.

Eve C.: Yeah. [Crosstalk] [0:37:54] another comment where the Ransom-ware gets on to host computers too, not also necessarily by phishing, but by let’s say an employee going to a site, even maybe a trusted site and they may click on a link within that site and that’s how the Ransom-ware or the malware get installed, so it’s going both ways. It’s, employees receiving phishing scams and then the employees going out to sites that may have the malware on those sites as well.

Zack S.: And those could be very well be legitimate sites that have been hacked
themselves.

Chuck: Oh that’s a good point.

Zack S.: So, a hacker will hack a legitimate website like “The Wall Street Journal,” and there will be some piece of malware that’s on that front page of that site, Wall Street Journal will probably be pretty hard to hack, but you know, any editorial, right and you go there and all of a sudden it comes up with some sort of a prompt that says “hey click this to view the latest blah, blah, blah” and you click it and then bam, you know, you’re owned, so first of all be wary of any sites you go to in the beginning, but if they ever ask you to do something if a websites literally asking you to click a button or approve something, or whatever don’t do it.

Chuck: That’s the basic rule I follow.

Zack S.: Even if it is a very legitimate website, because that legitimate website could have been hacked.

Paul B: What about sort of iPads, because more and more companies are using iPads instead of issuing laptops. I mean is there a way, you know, you’re going on a site and you’re getting all these little pop ups which you get on them, certainly get on iPad more than anything.

Zack S.: Yeah, you can get…

Paul B: I mean can that be introduced through an iPad?

Zack S.: Sure. Yeah, I mean, could it manifest itself from an iPad over to a PC that might be a hard thing to do, but, yeah iPhones get hacked, iPad gets hacked.

Eve C.: I mean if it’s on the network. Then it’s on the network.

Paul B: Yeah, yeah that’s what I’m thinking…

Chuck: Well, no but to Paul’s point. I think What he was trying to say is, you
know what you locked my iPad, good, I’m throwing that away and buy another one,
500 bucks instead of paying you $15,00 Right?

Paul B: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Chuck: Why is those get into your main PC frame with your two terabytes or something.

Zack S.: Well if the iPads got all your pictures on it and you haven’t saved it to iCloud and you want those pictures back and…

Eve C.: Yeah, and there’s that.

Chuck: Now what about social media? Is this, vulnerable to these sorts of things? I haven’t seen any, well I take that back, I have seen quite a few things. That’s also been a, questionable but… Is phishing hitting social media like Twitter?

Zack S.: It is.

Chuck: There’s, some weird clicks on there [crosstalk] [0:40:13]

Zack S.: I have a great Twitter story.

Chuck: I don’t care how large an appendage is on some woman’s Twitter, I’m not
going to a click on the site, I’m very apprehensive.

Zack S.: So, you want to hear a good twit, so there is a concept I’ll call “Twitter Phishing” and so let’s say you go to Chili’s to have dinner and you’re a Twitter user and you have a bad pretty bad meal, so you leave Chili’s and you take the Twitter and you, you say, “Just had a horrible meal at # Chili’s.” Well, a hacker will look at that, they’ll create a Twitter handle called “At Chili’s with an extra “L” in it, so you don’t recognize. They’ll send you a direct message, “Really sorry about your bad meal. Please take a picture of your receipt, upload it to this website and then oh, by the way, put your credit card number in and we’re going to refund your meal for you.”

Paul B: Oh, that’s a good one.

Chuck: That is so freaking clever. This is so clever.

Paul B: [Indiscernible] [0:41:02] doing that.

Chuck: Yeah, and that is amazing.

Eve C.: To ask you for your security code in, as well.

Zack S.: Of course, and you’re going to put it in you want your credit back [crosstalk] [0:41:10]

Chuck: Well I, I could especially see people in certain demographic, certain ages, right that, you know I’m an angry white guy with white hair, right. I’ll be all burned up about it. God darn you I’m, going to go do that right.

Zack S.: Yeah, and now Chili’s is going to give me my money back.

Chuck: Exactly.

Zack S.: That’s great [crosstalk] [0:41:21.

Chuck: Is that a fairly new thing?

Zack S.: It’s, I heard about it recently, yes.

Chuck: And so yeah, because you can create a Twitter account in five minutes and then it’s gone and they just deleted it. Nobody knows the difference.

Paul B: Well I think there’s a problem with the Twitter generation is the twits…

Zack S.: The tweets?

Eve C.: The twit generation.

Paul B: There’s a lot, of naiveté out there. I mean it’s just lot of naïve people [crosstalk] [0:41:41]

Cherise: Unfortunately the information that’s put on social media is used in a sense of profiling your victim, you’re profiling your target, so that…

Chuck: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Cherise: You could crack whatever kind of hack, whatever kind of phishing scam directed towards, that target just based on the profiling information you get on social media.

Zack S.: Some of the really smart guys now that are really smart security guys on social media like even on LinkedIn, they’re taking everything about them off. Facebook, they’re you know its first name only, there’s no pictures, it’s getting like and this hasn’t happened in mass quantities by any stretch, but I’ve come across some security guys that you just can’t find anything about them. Go to your company’s website, you know, they are people who are taking executives off the front page of the website. It’s like what’s the benefit versus the risk if everybody knows that’s the CEO of this small company.

Chuck: I’ve thought about that a lot, I mean I, I have, to like almost 15,000 people on LinkedIn, right. Its lot of people and done with 10,000 on Facebook and I get all kinds of questionable things and I can’t keep track of it anymore, right. So, if you’re General Archibald Smith and you spelled Archibald wrong and you don’t capitalize general, I’m suspicious, but some of them are very good and they are very hard to distinguish, if that’s real and I, I do worry. I mean I have to be public. I got to put things out there to people to follow right and…

Eve C.: A lot of us do, I mean we only in, LinkedIn nowadays, they always asking for your LinkedIn no matter where you’re applying.

Paul B: The problem is once you’re on there and you’ve been on there for a couple of years, I don’t care what you’re, what your profile is in now. It’s all out there. I mean, we use to have this with, you know, we’ve talent. Once, once they got a name out there, your information out there, it was no good trying to, trying to close that door, the barn door of the old [indiscernible] [0:43:26]

Chuck: Now why isn’t anybody thought of two way as an occasion for phishing scams, right? In other words, I don’t know how this should work; I’m just throwing this out, because my brain is not too big.

Cherise: You bring a, you bring up a great concept and in terms of the two way, that the premise behind it is that, there’s you double check and you’re authenticating whatever is on the other end twice by two types of methods of identification. That is the due diligence part that is missing in most cases. For example, when someone gets a phishing scam or a request to disclose personal information or to do that wire transfer. Why isn’t someone asking we need to confirm this identity and figure out the right process to do so?

Chuck: Is it technically possible too? The way I would think of it and this is oversimplified would be I get some email that has a link that I can click, but you know what, my Cooper Paul says, you’re not clicking nothing, until IT looks at it.

Cherise: Exactly.

Chuck: You know what you’re not going to get too many emails at work that you have to click something on. I’m thinking not too many, right and maybe there is
some way they could start with that kind of process that could be done right.

Zack S.: That’s a policy there and a policy has to be followed by a human. So, there again, you go you fall back under the human to act to follow the policy.

Chuck: Well, I think you can write some code that says I’m pulling your email off the server because it has a link on it and I’m going to hold it and quarantine until we verify, Cherise is that possible?

Paul B: So, I think most of us feel is it is before that comes in.

Zack S.: They do, they try and do that with technology and most of the time it works. 99.9% of the time…

Chuck: Like you said, there is a billion of them so [crosstalk] [0:44:55].

Zack S.: It only takes one. It only takes one.

Chuck: Man.

Eve C.: So, Zack, I have a question for you. When I buy this, let’s say I buy this product for my company, what exactly like what should I expect out of everybody else who is working with me, what will they have learned by the end of watching all of your videos?

Zack S.: Well, you know every video just focuses on what we call “one attack vector.” So, it’s one specific kind of attack. It’s…

Chuck: Now, you say you vector, do you really mean stupidity? I can say that, I’m going to say stupidity instead of vector.

Zack S.: A vector is a way in, so it focuses on one…

Chuck: Stupidity is the way in, that’s what I’m saying.

Zack S.: Okay, sure, so “one attack stupidity”

Eve C.: “One attack stupidity.”

Zack S.: Yeah and you know and we’ll end up covering spear phishing more than once. Spear phishing is a huge thing, when it will always have a different story line behind it and so you know once a client has been a client for a while, you know, there’s a really interesting phenomenon that happens with our content. Our first episode was about USB security. We had a client who reported after two weeks of that episode being released that the number of suspicious emails getting sent to IT about spear phishing went up by three times. So, think about that. We trained on USB security and all of a sudden because we launched security training they sent three more times suspicious emails to IT that had,
that were phishing emails, so I think…

Chuck: No, actual phishing emails, they caught?

Zack S.: Actual phishing emails that the employees would forward and say this
looks suspicious and so the reason…

Eve C.: That’s good.

Zack S.: It is good.

Eve C.: That’s really good, yeah.

Zack S.: It is and so what we’re doing is we’re, we’re even though we are training on one thing, we’re just raising the general awareness, right and so people are just a little bit more suspicious and so that’s what we’re going to report and that’s why releasing it once a month, you know and then so we release it once a month, two weeks after that, we release this little three pane, what we call an “anchoring cartoon” that just reinforces the video that they saw two weeks earlier, so it’s a real quick little reinforcement that they can, you know digest an email in ten seconds and we just feel like that constant like just touching with something that’s security-related just gets the antenna up and so I would say a client that’s on our program even for three months, they’re going to notice a pretty, they should notice a pretty significant difference.

Eve C.: Do you have any beta testers at the moment?

Zack S.: What do you mean by that?

Eve C.: Like do you have anybody testing it out like before you fully release?

Zack S.: Like a before and after?

Eve C.: Yeah, like do you have any stats on, I mean…

Chuck: Are you looking for a job or something?

Eve C.: No, I, [crosstalk] [0:47:27]. I’m just, I love tax so this is interesting to me, but you know you did mention you, you had somebody already there and you had like three times the amount of emails were sent in right. So, you already have somebody that’s testing it out.

Zack S.: Well, yeah, we have, we have [crosstalk] [0:47:41]. There’s just yeah, it was a client they’re just kind of gaining analytics, right. So, we do have a potential customer right now who I’m not allowed to say who they are, but they have taken 200 people. They’re giving 100 people our training; they’re giving the other 100 people not our training, so it’s a control group.

Eve C.: That’s awesome.

Zack S.: Then they’re going to launch an attack at them to see which group of the 100, you know of the 200, if the 100 group it does better.

Chuck: Its one group, are they both blind so the one group doesn’t know the, has the training.

Zack S.: That’s right.

Chuck: Oh, interesting. That’s a great idea.

Zack S.: Yeah and so they’re going to, I’m giving them the content free of charge for them to do this study and their company, that’s a very well-established and they can do studies.

Chuck: Have you thought of putting analytics into your training somehow?

Zack S.: Well, we have. I mean, we have some analytics so I can tell you right now we have an 81% engagement rate which means that out of, when we released the Episode to a 100 employees 81% of them consume it, which is pretty good. You know, most of our clients make the training mandatory, so they have to consume it right. What else?

Chuck: So, if it, if it’s just kind of voluntary trainings, 81% is still good.

Zack S.: Oh if it was voluntary?

Chuck: No, if you say its mandatory wise at 81%.

Zack S.: Well, because…

Chuck: There’s always people that don’t bother [crosstalk] [0:49:00]

Zack S.: You’re supposed to take this training and you don’t, yeah and so you know, we’ve, I mean, we’ve got clients that are literally at a 100% participation rate after four episodes, because they made the training mandatory [crosstalk] [0:49:12]

Paul B: Now you have a little test at the end, right.

Zack S.: We do.

Paul B: Just so you know how many people take that test and pass at the first time.

Zack S.: We don’t have those stats yet on who passes the first time, because we basically made it mandatory, that you have to pass it in order to complete the episode and get your certificate.

Chuck: Is that 100% pass rate that you [crosstalk] [0:49:32]

Zack S.: You have to eventually get a 100%, so you can keep guessing until you get it right and that and then that completes the episode, so that you can…

Paul B: So, is there, I mean is there, response there, you know you are getting
essential response?

Zack S.: Honestly, we don’t have enough clients outside of the U S to tell, you
know…

Paul B: Because it’s the same problem the world…

Zack S.: It is it is entire world yeah.

Chuck: You got to do one in Brazil and put Security Guy Radio on there.

Zack S.: There you go.

Chuck: I have a huge following in Brazil for some reason.

Paul B: You just want to go to Brazil.

Eve C.: In Brazil.

Chuck: No, we have, United States is one. U K is two; Brazil is number three for
followers. I have no idea why

Eve C.: Wow.

Zack S.: That’s crazy. I have good friends in, from Brazil.

Chuck: Very interesting.

Paul B: I don’t know, jut the Olympics.

Chuck: No, it was all there from the beginning, it’s from Brazil. I’m not sure what that is, very strange.

Paul B: Yeah we got some wired places, don’t we South Africa was a place.

Chuck: 93 countries lot of Middle Eastern countries unfortunately. Just kidding, we love you guys. Now when we talk, let me ask you a question about how the video runs, so Cal Chamber, California Chamber of Commerce has a website. They have a have a very good sexual harassment training module. The law says it has to be two hours, right. So, what I used to do before they fixed this was, like you said I play the video I’m doing something in the background, I go click, click, click, I get all, or I would skip forward to the answers and do a Q&A and I get them right. This is not too difficult, you know, but now what happens is
you play the video, and you have to watch every freaking minute and it goes for ten minutes and it stops and then you get to answer questions you cannot fast forward. Is your video; are your videos like that? Only four minutes not two hours.

Zack S.: It’s exactly like that. We do not have, all we have is a pause button
there’s no rewind, there’s no fast forward. It’s just the pause button you can
pause it.

Chuck: See four minutes is no brainer.

Zack S.: It no brainer, no one is pausing it anyway, unless you get phone call [crosstalk] [0:51:29]…

Eve C.: You can tell the volume as well.

Zack S.: No, because it’s actually.

Eve C.: YouTube used to do that where you, it didn’t matter if you lowered that’s what I would do before the APPs, but now you can’t, if you lower the volume at all it will pause your add.

Zack S.: Oh my Gosh, I didn’t know that.

Eve C.: I know, look at me trying to be [crosstalk] [0:51:47]

Paul B: There’s, all these people working to try and get around technology instead of just sitting there watching it. You must be more time trying to around [crosstalk] [0:51:54]…

Chuck: Yeah, but they’re not getting around the bad technology by clicking on buttons and stuff, by the way [crosstalk] [0:51:59]. That’s right, right any studies on why people fall for this stuff. I mean, in 1996 when the Internet was new I could see them falling for it right, but I mean really what’s…?

Zack S.: It looks legitimate. It just looks, I mean if you get something from your boss that says we are about to lose our relationship with this vendor if you don’t wire transfer $15,000 to this bank right now and you get that from your CFO, do you question them?

Chuck: So, are those are more of the phishing attack is now more, now explain that word to me Cherise its… we social and we social hack people, we get the background.

Cherise: Social engineer you profile them [crosstalk] [0:52:35]

Chuck: We call them maybe, yeah.

Cherise: You have grab the specific attack in using all the information that you can gather for example, Mattel, it was why we publicized that there was a CEO replacement, so within that first month, the attack took place. Why would that attack be so you know get executed the way it did because the turnover, there’s change in operations. People are, you know, it catches you by off guard basically.

Chuck: So, people my question is, is there more spear phishing or phishing from individual to individual to individual, or is the Bank of America saying you’re overdrawn, send me some money. It used to be companies, right at first it was kind of companies trying to…

Zack S.: Yeah, and there are still is that, and I would say that there are still more phishing attacks because those are a lot easier to do and you can do those, you know, it get casting at much wider net.

Chuck: Put at a million and grandma [crosstalk] [0:53:33] clicks on it and
that’s it.

Paul B: You know what the true issue is. There is an internal problem with people, you get something and this covers everything, and it doesn’t feel right, but they haven’t got the ability to say, you know, you have send this email, but there’s something wrong with it, because I guarantee the person that clicked on that you know the one for Mattel to pay the bill, thought that it wasn’t right.

Zack S.: It’s a hard stuff.

Eve C.: Well, you know the other thing with emails…

Paul B: But you got that fear, that, the old, you know the feeling of something is not right, if doesn’t feel right then don’t do it.

Eve C.: Well it’s not just that a lot of people don’t realize that it’s not illegal to email anybody’s email. It’s just like I can send you a letter to your home or I can send you a letter to email and there’s nothing illegal with that, so it’s like you just get so many things that you just don’t know what’s going on anymore I think and sometimes you get like those sales emails. Ever had any of those?

Paul B: You still, you don’t pay the Nigerian one do you?

Chuck: Some people still do.

Paul B: Well that’s true.

Chuck: I mean my basic rule is I just, delete it and guess what if it’s real and its important someone is going to call you and say, wait a minute Zack and I respond. I mean that’s… I mean, that’s what’s going to happen if you delete it, nothing. If it is legitimate you are going to, follow-up on that right.

Eve C.: That’s true. That’s very true.

Chuck: My hair cuts, have you noticed my hair is actually whiter, since I started the show [crosstalk] [0:55:06]. It was salt and pepper, it is just white. Every time I’ve done with the show I get more and more worried about all this stuff. What about mobiles, real quickly Cherise bring your own device or Zack issues with that have done new shows about bringing your own device, but that’s now where people bringing their own cell phone, or smart phone, because the cheap if the company lets you pay for your own and they give in allowance for it.

Zack S.: Yeah, I mean the BYOD is an issue because it’s much harder for you to control somebody’s personal cell phone than it is a company issued cell phone. Now that being said any smart company is going to put a piece of software on there, it’s called MDM, Mobile Device Management software and so they’ll have a requirement it you says for you to even to bring your personal device you have to install our MDM software on there so that we can monitor or manage it for you.

Chuck: But, what we’re hearing Cherise is that, what was the number fifth, the show we did a few weeks ago, over 50% of these hacks are Bring Your Own Device enabled, right. Maybe not spear phishing but I mean generally hacking a lot of it happens on the mobile stuff now.

Cherise: Yes, and unfortunately with the, what’s coined as BYOD is that you have different variants of mobile devices running on different operating systems whether that’s Apple, whether it’s an Android et cetera, and then those applications that are running on those different OS are actually the attack vectors that open up the holes to network that aren’t being secured by some software and so then you’re opening up emails, work information and exposing that on your mobile devices and you even know what applications are posing the biggest risk on those individual BYOD.

Chuck: Well, I think if you open your work email on your phone, it is not the same as sitting at your desk, because you might not notice the result because you are not in the office, it’s probably different response like you just go past it…

Did you know you need to build a city the size of London EVERY MONTH FOR #& YEARS to keep up with the 10,000 people that move from rural areas to cities every HOUR?!?

Do you know the average person in Paris spends FOUR YEARS of their life looking for parking?

I visited Cisco HQ in San Jose and sat down with not only the two smartest guys in the room, but the two smartest guys in the city. Anil Menon and Munish Khetrapal discuss how Cisco is building “Smart Cities” with the Internet of Everything.

As microcosms of the Internet of Everything (IoE), cities stand to benefit the most from connecting people, process, data, and things.

Working with Cisco, in partnership with global and local innovators, cities are developing IoE-related projects, platforms, and implementations. Importantly, the IoE ambitions and scope
are designed to respond to the need for real-time, context-specific information intelligence and analytics to address specific local imperatives.

The lessons and framework from many pilots can provide other cities with a pattern language for progressing strategies, and for developing their own city initiatives.

Cities: Fertile Ground for Realizing IoE Value

Over the past few years, the definition of “Smart Cities” has evolved to mean many things to many people. Yet, one thing remains constant: part of being “smart” is utilizing information and communications technology (ICT) and the Internet to address urban challenges.

The number of urban residents is growing by nearly 60 million every year. In addition, more than 60 percent of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2050. As a result, people occupying just 2 percent of the world’s land will consume about three-quarters of its resources. Moreover, more than 100 cities of 1 million people will be built in the next 10 years.1

Today’s cities face a variety of challenges, including job creation, economic growth, environmental sustainability, and social resilience. Given these trends, understanding where we are in the evolution of the Internet is critical to future city-planning
processes.

In terms of phases or eras, Cisco believes that many organizations are currently experiencing the Internet of Things (IoT), the networked connection of physical objects. As things add capabilities like context awareness, increased processing power, and energy independence, and as more people and new types of information are connected, IoT becomes an Internet of Everything — a network of networks where billions or even trillions of connections create unprecedented opportunities as well as new risks

Given these trends, understanding where we are in the evolution of the Internet is critical to future city-planning processes.

Chuck Harold & Guests

Anil MenonGlobal President for Smart Connected Communities in Digital Cities

Munish Khetrapal

Chuck HaroldThe Security Guy

Full text of radio show

Please forgive any typos, this podcast was transcribed by my typing pool comprised of volunteer stalkers.

Chuck: Welcome to Security Guy Radio. Sir, what’s your name?

Munish: Munish Khetrapal. I take care of solutions for Smart Cities for Cisco globally.

Chuck: And sir, what’s your name on screen?

Anil: I’m Anil Menon. I am the Global President for Smart Connected Communities in Digital Cities, so I manage the business globally. I’m sitting here in…

Chuck: Where are you? I’m sorry.

Anil: I’m sitting here in Bangalore, India.

Chuck: Another security guy, multi-national global interview. I’m so pleased about this. Now, I’m really happy to be here at Cisco. This is a big deal to me, okay, here’s why, back in the day, in 1984, I got my first computer. It was two floppy drives and it had an IBM operating system and then somebody said, “Hey there is this thing called DOS” and oh, I got to get it and I researched that and then, you know, couple of years later people put in computers and there’s this thing called Cisco and it’s called a router, what’s a router and I knew all this stuff, right and I kept saying, I got to buy some stock in all these things and my wife said no. We’re not going to, it’s too risky. We can’t do that, I’d be a freaking billionaire, because I got all this stuff early on and I love the technology and I appreciate the technology. If I could write code it would be very dangerous, luckily I can’t write code, right, so tell me about Cisco. Now, Cisco was started in 1984, and at Stanford if I remember correctly?

Munish: That’s correct.

Chuck: I think you guys had one of the first routers that being — the whole trick was you guys could upload your software to the router and do the updates, which was unique at the time, right. That’s kind of what made you different and you had some routers that lasted and switches that lasted ten years, because they were so well done right.

Munish: Probably more yeah.

Chuck: Yeah and then the name Cisco comes from San Francisco.

Munish: That’s correct.

Chuck: I always thought those two things on top of the logo were you know, network broadcasting some people they say Golden Gate Bridge.

Munish: Yes, it is.

Chuck: Yeah, very interesting, so it’s a fascinating company.

Anil: Hey Chuck. While you talk about your 1984 experience with Cisco I just have one more to add to it, which is, in my prior life well before IBM I used to be a professor and technology companies would come to see me and say, “Would you please send us your best students” and couple of my former students came to see me and this was 1991, I think, ’91, ’92 and I said “you know we are a fast growing company, this is an amazing company, this company is called Cisco, would you give us some of your best students and I still remember not knowing a lot about Cisco, because I knew IBM, I knew Digital, I knew all the others, but not Cisco. I said you know, I’m not quite sure, I want to send my best people to a company that is named after a cowboy character and there you are and there we are today, but you are exactly right, it is in many ways I think if not for the routers and the switches and Cisco being the so called backbone of the Internet we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Chuck: I agree and people do need to realize that you really were and are still I think the backbone of the Internet and to my neighbor teen who doesn’t understand the stuff, that’s how you can get on your websites and do all your stuff, right. So, it’s really important. Now we’re going to talk about Smart Cities today. This is something near and dear to my heart, because I worry about infrastructure. I’m always worried about infrastructure, all right and as we look at our cities I travel around the country a lot, right. You see cities, for lack of a better term in decay right, because we didn’t build enough reservoirs, we didn’t put the highways, we can’t fix the potholes and now cities are thinking “Hey, I got to build up the physical infrastructure, but I have to integrate that now with technology, right” and so you guys have a solution for that that I think is fascinating. I like that it’s Smart Cities because we have a lot of Idiots of [indiscernible] cities in the country so to speak and dumb cities that aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do. So tell me about the Smart Cities program and how that works?

Munish: Yeah, so probably and I’ll start here, 2001 and 2002 there was a huge building aspects in Middle East and Dubai specifically. So we looked, started looking at buildings and we started looking at saying how can technology help to improve efficiency of buildings and we had a consolidated backbone. You’ve got hundreds of different systems in the building, fire alarm, HVAC, lighting and all of these things. If you could converge all of these building infrastructure you could create efficiency, you could create improvement of energy savings, you could improve experiences and all of that stuff, so 2006-2007 there is a huge urban trend and I remember specifically, I going into Songdo in Korea, in South Korea and we had a huge piece of land and they were going to build a new city. They were going to add 250,000 people and we looked at the opportunity and said, “Hey this is a large opportunity for us.”

Chuck: From the ground up they’re going to build a city?

Munish: Absolutely. They were reclaiming land, In fact ‘90s it was completely ocean they reclaimed land over 15 years that was the fastest reclamation process and they were going to build a 250,000 people city.

Chuck: Interesting.

Munish: That time they were…

Anil: It is the same spot where the General MacArthur landed for the Battle of Korea, exact same spot.

Chuck: Wow, that’s fascinating.

Munish: So, there were looking at about 5,000 people at that time, two or three buildings and now if you go there ten years from there it’s about 100,000 people. It’s getting populated, so we started thinking about what can we do as a city. If you start thinking about how land has, how land is built, how roads are constructed, electricity, water pipes and all of that. Internet and IP today is an equally important capability where people have to connect information and we know a lot of our children specifically if you don’t have Internet they are lost. They don’t mind having, no dinner is fine, but you better have the Internet connection on. So, connectivity would improve a whole lot of efficiency and if and then you start thinking about the rapid urbanization and rapid urbanization specifically around…

Chuck: Rapid urbanization, that’s an interesting term, okay, but define that for me.

Munish: So, people moving into cities from rural and in 2006 there were more people living in cities than in, more people living in cities than in rural areas.

Chuck: Now this is worldwide in general, right.

Munish: Worldwide in general.

Chuck: In places like Detroit…

Anil: Today, Chuck I think on an average 10,000 people are moving from rural areas to cities per hour worldwide which means…

Chuck: Per hour?

Anil: In order to keep up, in order to keep up with the urbanization that is taking place, the point that Munish was making, you have to build a city the size of London every month for the next 36 years to catch up.

Chuck: All right, hold on a second. My little Security Guy Radio brain just had a short circuit. You have to build a city the size of London once a month.

Anil: Every month. Every month till the end, till for 36 years.

Chuck: Every month. For 36 years.

Anil: In order to accommodate the rate, so if you come into parts of Latin America, Africa, India and Asian countries what you find, for example, a city like Bombay which is 20 plus million 70% of the people there are living in what would technically be considered to be slums, because the infrastructure is incapable of handling that and managing it and the same thing applies to the road traffic, same thing applies to water, same thing applies to lighting, same thing applies to healthcare, the whole country of Tanzania of 43 million people with a highest birth rate and the highest child infant mortality or heart condition, there is not a single pediatric surgeon, not one single pediatrics radiologist, not one single pediatric pulmonologist. So this entire infrastructure thing it’s just collapsing under the weight of urbanization and you can’t stop it, because people are leaving urban — rural areas to come to urban areas not because they want to live in these horrible conditions, but because of lack of urban services in rural areas, healthcare, education, jobs and some culture, so this inexorable shift is what Munish is talking about.

Chuck: Unbelievable, that’s very amazing, interesting and people don’t want to stay in there, we don’t, we’re not going bring the city backwards to the urban areas, wouldn’t that be easier? We can’t stop it people want to be where that they think infrastructure is, very interesting.

Munish: Absolutely and there is some more anecdotes, about 600 people on a daily basis move into the city of Bangalore. There are about 300 children that mean, that means you need one school a week to be constructed to educate those children.

Chuck: Which isn’t happening, I assume not even close, right. Wow.

Munish: You can spend four years of your life finding parking in downtown Paris. That’s an average time you spend, because you take 30 minutes a day and you add that up that’s four years of your life.

Chuck: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think in LA it might ten years. It’s crazy, I mean it’s, it is true that we have never been able to keep up with the growth and I’m happy to hear you guys talking about this from a technology point of view, because I think that is a solution, so tell me how you guys…

Anil: But, you know, you said something which is very important and I just want to take a second, because Munish particularly drives that quite a bit, but you mentioned the word ‘infrastructure’ and I think there in is where we came in. You said you have physical infrastructure the things that Munish talked about buildings and roads and parkways and ports and airports and green spaces, so Governments, Mayors and everybody have been thinking about the physical infrastructure, but they have ignored for far too long the digital infrastructure. That would be the equivalent of saying, I’m going to build a building today or build a city and let’s worry about the water and electricity, but we’ll worry about, I’m sorry we have built the buildings, but we’ll worry about water and electricity later. I don’t think anybody does that, but today they are doing something similar to that when they think in terms of digital infrastructure, so for example and if you think about the same thing was true a 100 years back in London 1914, 1913 there were 65 utility companies with 49 different standards that didn’t, that just couldn’t work with each other.

Today that’s not, we have that situation in most cities with Wi-Fi and digital, you know, you have all the hotspots and all the Wi-Fi systems and all the different infrastructure companies providing different forms of connectivity and they don’t really integrate and that is where we come in. I mean, Cisco you mentioned switches and routers. We are in the business of making protocols that don’t talk to each other, talk to each other. That’s what a switch does, that’s what a router does, so that is why we got involved saying, we know how to make all these technologies, while you may have a, you know, one of the things that Munish drove early on were building automation systems. So you may have a smart building automation system, you may have the smart HVAC system, you may have a smart lighting system, you may have a smart elevator, but the protocols don’t talk to each other, you really don’t have a smart building.

Chuck: That’s right. You have a dormant building.

Anil: How do you make it? That’s exactly it.

Chuck: Well, I agree with you 100%. I think part of the challenge is this, here is my take on it, so I’m 55 years old, I did my first computer in ‘84, I grew up with the stuff, I get it. My peer group did not, 90% of my friends they’ll balance their check-book with Quicken, they don’t get it, alright and they go, “How could you do that?” It’s old school. Some of our leaders in that place, they’re of an age where they kind of missed the technology. You know, you guys went to school early, you got it. There’s my kids that get it, but there’s this group in the middle, that have not come of age, they are leading cities and leading people and I don’t think, you know, either one of our presidential candidates know a thing about email, right or how to, to do anything, so how do you take a leader and sell this to him, right and this is the big challenge. It’s not that they are not intelligent, that’s just not their thing, right and it is about integration, so you guys really if you think about it on one level you’re integrators, right, because your routers and switches could always speak to the networks and so you’re in the proper position to do it, right. So, how do you, how do you handle it? Are you going beyond the routers and the switches now and getting into more than connectivity, how you’re handling it?

Munish: Yeah, so if you take a little bit of step back about three to four years back, we used to spend a lot of time talking to the leaders across and Mayors across the world, saying what is a smart city, what will it do? Couple of years back in, we had this IoT World Forum in Barcelona. We educated people and we said, here is how the City has been built, here’s how lighting happens, here’s how parking, waste management it improves efficiency, so it was an education session. When we moved to Chicago, we had an IoT World Forum in Chicago. We did not talk about what’s a smart city any more. We talked about how do we start building Smart Cities, where, where do we start, where is the biggest bank for the buck, what kinds of capabilities we need to look at? Last year, in IoT World Forum in Dubai, all the leaders we were talking to, saying we got it, we know where to start, we need to start lighting and traffic and parking, these are immediate impact areas, but let’s now see how do we fund it? So, the education of what a Smart City is we really moved in that area.

Chuck: Now do you think it’s…

Anil: I just want to add, I want to add one thing to what Munish said, which is an important one, which is your point is absolutely well taken that there is a certain level of understanding and then there is a certain level of misunderstanding and a certain level of lack of understanding and there are three levels.

Chuck: Good points. Yeah.

Anil: And let me take each of those in a particular way and obviously, lot of the Mayors get the idea that digital and digital technologies are important for the citizens and the businesses will be better understand it, we better deploy it, just like we did with the other utilities, but you also have different levels of misunderstanding as to what they are and one of the biggest misunderstanding, one of my biggest frustrations to the fact when you talk about Smart Cities they equate that only with technology and they say Smart Cities equal Digital Cities and one of the things we keep saying is that, technology is only an enabler, a city is not going to be smart unless you have the processes, you have regulations, you have, you know, standards all of which that allows you to deploy it in such a way that transform the delivery of urban services.

So for example, you know, just one example would be, there are privacy laws or even work labor laws in some countries where you may put a camera, but then a person has to come and write the ticket and hand it over, because of, when that happens the experience is not going to change for a citizen and also your expenses will not change. Your operational cost will not change because you haven’t changed the infrastructure, you haven’t rethought the way city would be operated and managed.

So, the whole idea that we come through is we always say it is about zoning policies, it is about public-private partnerships, it is about making sure that the citizen’s experience and the soul of the city is managed and technology just enables you to do some things that you could not do before and then of course, you have classic misunderstanding of what issues are and the most common, which I know is a topic dear to your heart, but I’ll come to that. I’ll just give you one practical, this is absolutely true story in presenting to some Ministers, very high-level Ministers in a country, it’s an emerging country, so I won’t mention the name of the country for obvious reasons you’ll know in a minute. We talked about how you could take all this data and put it into the Cloud and then you can enable, you know mobile and all the others and the Minister seriously said, “Well we have serious monsoons in this country. You put anything into the Cloud you’re not going to be able to make it.”

Chuck: I believe, I know.

Anil: So, I’m not quite sure, I didn’t have the heart to ask him, “Do you actually think we’ll put it in a balloon all the data it sits in the Cloud” you know, the point is for him a cloud is a physical thing that he was thinking about, so I didn’t even want to talk about, cloud computing which is what we have been pushing, because that will have a different set of conversation right away, but the thing that comes back is, I think very often what happens is, there are concerns about privacy of data and especially in different parts of the world there are different standards and second one is the security of the data and hacking and very often they get comingled and there and it’s the biggest level of misunderstanding that we have to deal with when we deal with the political side, with the civil side and the technology side.

Chuck: Yeah, I agree. I had AMAG on my show couple of weeks ago, right. So, they’re the big access control people, right and they have, you know, the same model they’re going to integrate stuff into the building so this all works together. His biggest challenge, the Vice President tells me is that, everything eventually is policy driven, right. So, you guys can wire up LA tomorrow let’s say Burbank, Burbank’s better, let’s wire up Burbank, get it all working, everything talks to each other, we have all the technology, but if the city’s policies think that the cloud is up, you know, a physical cloud, the policies aren’t going to work and then the whole system doesn’t work, so how do you handle the policy integration with your Smart City approach, right, because really that all has to be integrated, we have cameras that capture license plates and you know, that’s great, but if the policy says, we write tickets for everybody instead of writing tickets for some people, then you have, you have disruption, right. How do you handle the policy discussion when you start to wire a city up?

Munish: So, when we look at policies, the whole security privacy framework we break it up into a PPP model, it’s not Public-Private Partnership, it’s Policy, it’s Privacy and it’s Process and you need to bring these three together using security as a technology as an underlying factor to enable policy to be better, enable process to be better, enable the privacy to be managed.

Chuck: You start with a policy; so you think that’s a better place to start?

Munish: So, most of the time the conversation start with privacy as we see in cities.

Chuck: It does start with privacy, okay. That’s interesting to me.

Munish: That’s where really the conversation starts.

Chuck: When I wanted to sell something at Fox right. I, if I want to bring in the latest technology, latest widget or gadget or whatever was right. I had to start with the executive level and get a buy in, right, because if they bought into it and they got the idea and they thought it was good. They drill the policy downstairs to tell people, this is coming, we’re going to put this in, not and if I try to put it in first and then make a policy out of it, I usually failed. That was my experience. I’m talking about access control in 1996 where nobody had access control, you know, that kind of stuff, so it’s interesting, I know everybody’s worried about the privacy technology. Do you think they don’t understand it, which is why they are more scared about it?

Munish: I think it’s a question of awareness and you’re probably right. Understanding is one aspect of it, but it’s also about the fear of unknown. It’s about educating people and we worked with the Kansas City very recently, where the government and the city government, every week used have a session with the citizens telling them what exactly they’re doing. How they are lighting the streets, how is it going to improve the overall economic welfare, how is it going to decrease cost, how is it going to create values. Citizen engagement kiosks where people can go in and engage with the city, they can provide inputs on how the city should be governed, they can get information on what’s happening, so it’s all about engagement and education. Once people understand what they are getting into, it becomes lesser of a concern. In fact, it does not. It’s not a concern at all.

Chuck: You know, I…

Anil: Hey Chuck.

Chuck: Yeah go ahead.

Anil: One, there is a significant difference between, although it seems from a technical point of view what you brought up the 1984 issues and policies while it’s technically comparable to where we are today. There is a difference and you know the thing is, when we started with the Internet and when we started talking about networking and the whole World Wide Web in ’83, ’84, there was nothing there to replace it. There was nothing there before that this was replacing in some ways, it might have been replacing, you know, faxes and all of that, but it’s a very different story. Today when we go into lighting, there’s a 100 year installed base of doing lighting and water and the way the cities have been managed. So today when we go and what they’re trying to do is, is they are trying to force fit what we do within the existing model of running a business, the existing budget systems, the existing regulations and that is where the struggles begin.

Chuck: Oh, good point.

Anil: Because high load – talking about the policy they are saying, we have a policy of not doing this. I’ll give you an example. In, Dubai when we started out and we were doing this lightings, Munish can tell you, the biggest challenge we had there was that during the day they would not be sending electricity to the lighting poles, because they didn’t need it, but we did need electricity to the lighting poles so that we can run the cameras for traffic.

Chuck: Oh, good point, yeah.

Anil: That policy change was not as simple, even at Cisco when we tried to integrate and Munish was driving a lot of that, when we tried to integrate our outlooks with the building management system so that all the office spaces can become very comfortable and you can see when you walk out of the Cisco room you can see, you know, not only the layout of the office spaces and the conference room but who is using it and up to when, that took us almost six to eight months, just to get the policies changed to get privacy issues and HR issues, technical things to align. So the biggest challenge we have sometimes is that there is an installed base and I remember my former boss, our former boss, [indiscernible] at the IoT forum in Barcelona saying that God was able to create the world in seven days, because there was no installed base. He didn’t have to change it.

Chuck: That’s a good point.

Anil: That is not the case…

Chuck: No, it’s a great point. I used to, you know, Fox and Disney sent me to all these corporate, you know, training things all the time. I’m very fortunate to have that background. One of the things they used to teach is, if the Titanic was going to turn around it took, you know, three miles to do it, it just doesn’t just turn around right away, because it’s a big giant thing and requires a certain process, right and so the frustration what we see is that the technology is here, all the Internet of things, computer geeks and people that know what they’re doing can all turn it on tomorrow, but I love your point that this is coming up against this policy block and if the guy in the city says oh, no our policy is we don’t turn the lights and it’s going to take you a year to change it, because it’s a bureaucracy and in some cities or places more than worse

Anil: You know, you take that example, let’s take France and Paris as an example, where data privacy and where the data is located it’s almost a religion, it’s almost sacred and it was a non-negotiable discussions for a long time till the Paris attacks.

Chuck: Oh, that’s interesting.

Anil: After the Paris attacks even the citizens said, “Listen that information existed, but because of some of our privacy laws and because we couldn’t take the data from one parish [phonetic] [0:22:51] to the other that was restricting our security, so now the question is not whether we should or not do it, it is the level and degree as to how we would do it, who would get it and how is it going to be used. So, I think we’re going to evolve to that stage of not whether you’re going to collect the data and not whether you’re going to use the data as much as who is collecting the data, who is going to use it and the citizen or the one from whom the data is coming will have a bigger say, as to how much of data they are willing to give up.

Chuck: Now Burbank has a smart meter supposedly not too smart, because my electric bill keeps going up when I want to keep using like less electricity, right. And allegedly it’s tied in to the Wi-Fi and this is preventing the meter guy from coming out and you know, they never open up my water cover at the parkway. So, I know they’re not going check on my water, so my bill has gone up since the smart technology is put in place in Burbank. I have mixed feelings on the information thing, right. So I opted into this and I to your point if people want to opt in and participate say, “You can have my data, you can use it that might be a place to start,” have you looked at policies that way where if you come into a city, you can say look anybody that doesn’t want their data we are just not going to collect it, is that a possibility?

Anil: That is daily Munish’s life, Munish has got more stories to tell you on that than any other.

Munish: And that’s really a process issue, but coming back to policy and process and how they can interact with each other, this is in fact, right now we’re on our third generation platform for cities itself and we’ve progressed.

Chuck: By the way, I forgot to ask, how long have you been doing the Smart Cities?

Munish: That will reflect my age, about eight or nine years.

Chuck: Really that long, okay.

Munish: Yeah.

Chuck: Interesting.

Munish: So, the first generation when we walked in and especially in Korea, we had 21 agencies collaborating over 3,000 pages of process and policy documents.

Chuck: 3,000 pages?

Munish: Of process and policy documents and how a Smart City needs to be built driven by the Central Government, so Korea had the vision of Smart Cities in 2001. They wanted, they knew that this is going to be a differentiation factor and we could, we started building a whole platform and technology to have an end-to-end integrated approach, because the process and policy allowed us. After the whole real estate issues that happened in 2008 and when Europe and US started looking at Smart Cities in a big way, we realized all the things about having existing infrastructure installed base became a big issue. So we had to rethink our whole strategy as to how we would build our digital platform, because you cannot have an integrated platform.

So, now today, in today’s offering that we have and the way we are taking it to the market is we are looking at a capability, where each of the departments can store the data, can have their own policies and processes. Like think about you going to a bank locker, you can store, you have your small subset locker, you have a big infrastructure, which is the bank, which is the Cloud infrastructure and each of them have the key and the bank has their key as well. Now if the transport department wants to share the data to the lighting department they can give that access to that key. They can tell them that I want to share only this piece of data and no other piece of data, because all the lighting department needs to know is where is the traffic flow, where there is congestion, if there is no traffic between 4 in the morning and 6 in the morning. I can reduce the luminosity of light from 90% down to 40%, save energy without impacting security.

Chuck: I like that approach. I think that’s a great way to do it. However on the other side of it, do you lose analytics, do you lose the 30,000 foot view of how everything together is operating, if you’re putting that data into silos, right.

Munish: Right, so having the key and giving the information to each of the agencies to maintain the privacy, maintain policies and ensure the processes are built are important, but now as a City Manager and as a Mayor if he wants to start integrating all of these systems and data he has the access to the key or he can, he’s like the Central Bank and he has access to the key and he can say I want to bring all of this piece of data which is not privacy-related, which respects the policy, we bring that to improve analytics and improve capability and experience and one of the cities we are engaging with, is they have a radar sensor that’s monitoring how many cars are stopped at a traffic signal and based on that they can decide to change the traffic controls and improve efficiency and flow which we all want better traffic flow.

Chuck: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Munish: But, now he can take the data and give it to his marketing department who will sell the data to a billboard right opposite to the traffic signal to say, “Every time a car is stopped at the traffic signal I’m going to charge double the amount for advertisement, because the eyeball is going to look at it.

Chuck: That’s strange. Well, yeah it comes back to for that kind of stuff too.

Munish: So, he can increase his revenue, fund the whole automatic transmissions and all the traffic control systems, so that he does not have to pay anything extra, improves the overall efficiency of the city, without any cost to anybody.

Chuck: Yeah. This is important stuff. I remember the City of Beverly Hills back in the day probably they might have started this in the ‘80s or ‘90s. The intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica, I think is the busiest intersection in the world, one of them something like that it’s like you know, 40,000 cars an hour it’s a crazy thing and so Beverly Hills had congestion problem and what they did is they just kind of studied it, like you just said, it’s old school manual study, right and they came out with the policy. The policy was we’re going to turn Santa Monica Boulevard Green for three miles all at once, all lights will be green at the same time and we’re going to run that for two minutes and guess what you can get all way through Beverly Hills very quickly that way and what it also, there is a secondary thing is to cut down on crime in a way, right, because you’re not loitering around, stuck in the city, looking at stuff what’s going on, it’s like you go to Beverly Hills, do your business or you don’t, right. So, this is really important stuff and I’m wondering my question is; how much do you guys think of this data you’re analyzing, collecting and you know, chopping up. How much is privacy, how much is not privacy? I mean, is it, you know, what color the light is, it’s not really a privacy issue, right, but my license plate is, maybe, but I say guess, what your license plate isn’t because you’re out in the public with it, right. Who owns it, yes, the plate itself, no I mean, see what I’m saying how do you handle all those different levels of concern?

Munish: Yeah, so I think the technology itself, there are different technologies that implement or execute on the different privacy concerns, so if, example if you go to Germany, you’ll find that their privacy filters that if you’re looking at how many people are in front of a bus stop, they will ensure that the faces are completely cleaned up, even though it’s a video feed and their privacy filters and technology allows that to happen and you can have a radar sensor that’s just counting the cars or counting information. It does not know really which car and who is driving…

Chuck: It’s dumb right.

Munish: It’s dumb, but it’s achieving the purpose, so you have the technology and you have different options in technology. On the other hand if you want to use License Plate Readers when you’re going into a parking lot, because you want to find out how many people came in, how long they came in and you want to bill them accordingly. I’d love to have a License Plate Reader when I go into a parking lot because I don’t have to stop. I can connect it to my credit card. I drive right in and in Korea they’ve implemented that, so you drive in with the license plate they read it and when you drive out they read your license plate and bill you for the difference.

Chuck: Well and this can all be done on my, you know, my side of the business for security, right, physical security. If I’m at Disneyland and I had a License Plate Reader and I found out that your license plate comes in here three times a week between seven and ten and 12 in some pattern I might say, “Wait a minute, I got a, you don’t love Disneyland that much, right. It would indicate it could be some kind of a criminal act or something, right. So, when you’re working with governments on this, the efficiency part I get, right, but do they are they concerned, I mean the privacy thing I don’t get with the video in Germany, right. So, I’m in public, I’m walking around, what’s my privacy issue? You can see me driving down the street, right. So, do you have a lot of different policies around the world with this kind of stuff, is it, it seems like there’s all over the board with this.

Munish: It’s very, very different.

Anil: You know, you know, you’re making a very interesting point, because I think privacy is a very cultural issue.

Chuck: It seems like it.

Anil: It is not just a technical issue. Just to give you a sense I mean, if you think about the way my kids and the younger kids use social media, I’m not quite sure their definition of privacy is the same as mine. They are very open — talking about what is happening to them to the levels that you’re like seriously you’re putting that up on, on Instagram and all the others that’s one. You gave a very interesting example I’ll give you one in Bangalore, when at the airport. Now what is interesting about the Bangalore airport and you’ll see this increasingly worldwide, a lot of the airports are becoming private, that they’re being handed over to private companies who are then running it on a concession plan or permanent plan where they have a sort of an SLA with the governments on what performance, which means that they look to monetize everything that is around the airport and the flying experience. So they put these cameras and what they find and in fact it’s true even elsewhere, if you want to look for cars you give the example of why these cars are moving around. They found a case where on many instances, where you saw a certain level of cars coming in and leaving, right. It’s clear that they were running a private taxi service.

Chuck: Oh interesting.

Anil: They’re not running a taxi with a license, so they could then go back and track them and say, “What are you doing here seven times a day? And if you’re coming here seven times a day, you’re a taxi. I don’t care whether you say it’s a private license” so it keys a whole bunch of things that pops up in this so-called shared economy and Uber world, which is why many cities try to shut down Uber and I keep saying “You can shut down Uber, but you’re not going to shut down Uberism” because people want that service. They like the service in some form, so I think on privacy what’ll happen increasingly is that as people understand and they recognize for personalized medicine, if you need to know how this medicine is going to work on you specifically, you will have to give up some of your personal information on your behaviors and how you’re consuming it and how are your life patterns are because for you that medicine dosage is most optimal at 10:30 in the morning, because of your genetics and because of your lifestyle as opposed to at 8:30 for somebody else. People will realize and then I think people’s willingness to give up data is a commensurate with what they think they’re getting back for that data and how much control or what might happen, that’s bad.

I’ll give you a simple example, that is so irritating that to me it goes well beyond privacy issues to just stupidity. Last week, was mother’s, two weeks ago was Mother’s Day and also Mother’s Day and my wife’s birthday is the same day, so I was searching for cards for us on Papyrus. I swear to God, I cannot turn on or go to Google, anywhere without having Papyrus ads come at me and they’re showing me the same cards that I bought.

Chuck: Oh, yeah. Yeah. They’re little evil.

Anil: A, that is stupid marketing, B, what other information are you collecting of mine that you may be using and who is using it. So I think it is that kind of information that leads people to nervousness I think.

Chuck: Well it’s, we’re really at the level of “Minority Report” remember that movie?

Munish: Yes.

Chuck: Tom Cruise?

Anil: Absolutely.

Munish: Absolutely.

Chuck: I mean, he walks through the mall and they scan his retina and says, “Hey Tom, would you like some cornflakes” and you know, so I look at it two ways right. I’m quasi-public. I got like, you know, bunch of followers, I got a bunch of stalkers. I’ve arrived because I have stalkers that send me weird stuff on the Internet, right and I look at it two ways. I say, nothing’s private to me, you know, what? I’m not hiding anything, I got nothing to worry about my life, I don’t have any secrets, go for it and I protect my infrastructure locally. I protect my house, I protect my data that kind of thing, right, because I think if you, the hard you try to lock it down, the more risk you sometimes run, right, in making the data available. Now one thing about terrorism is they get about 85% of all the data they get on us is open source.

They don’t have bunch of spies running around, they have 85% of the people looking on the Internet saying, “Hey, let me get a building architect plan for the studio over here, right and they find it, right. So, I’ve thrown this idea out to a couple of people. I know it sounds crazy, but I throw it out anyway. You know, what if everything was in open platform, an open architecture and I had access and nobody had everybody has everybody else’s numbers or privacy things, then there is no privacy, but then there’s no risk of anything being stolen, misused, right. So, if you make it so secret it becomes valuable right.

Anil: You did, you just said Chuck, you did what you just said and go back to something that Munish and I have talked about quite a bit and we actually have that and Munish maybe, I’ll just put it up and you can, you can build on it with what we’re trying to do in Hamburg and elsewhere. Here issue today, you just go into the streets and you’ll see there’s a camera for police, there’s a camera for traffic, there’s a camera for private, you know, whatever the private buildings may have or whatever. That means you have three to four infrastructures of cameras and the argument is that, police needs to have different levels of information that say the traffic police and definitely certain different levels that is needed by private or quasi-private entities. What if you had the same feed, but you put protocols that the grades, that data feed to a different level of clarity for different uses. Think of it as workloads and then say the police will get a different set, because the policy is written for that.

We have all our financial data on one platform inside Cisco, but depending on your organization, depending on your level in the company and you need to know there are protocols put into play that suggests that you’re not going to get this kind of data, you’ll get a different aggregation than somebody else would. You could do the same thing when you’re walking around as an individual, you may be able to do, in some things be able to say, “I know you need to know that I’m a male, that I’m of a certain age, but you don’t need to get an exact picture of my face,” so I’m going to put up some kind of protocol that doesn’t allow you to take the clarity of my eyebrows or my eyelids, I’m just saying you could get to that level where you can do it, because one of the things that I’m seeing in many cities and the reasons why labor unions and the others are resisting it, is because they feel I don’t want my boss to know if I’m in a different location or even for that my family if I’m at a different location than I said I was…

Chuck: Yeah, information is power.

Anil: Plenty of reasons for it, but Munish, this idea of protocol and policies and degradation of data or at least some kind of manipulation of data so as to see that same data is available to your open platform idea, but it’s that data is not useful, it is the insights you draw from the data, which is nothing, but policy-driven and it is that level that we should be also thinking about.

Munish: Yeah and so technology is the way we have implemented some of these technologies in Hamburg we have implemented, where you’re figuring out how many cars are going around of this. Somebody stop the trucks that can be stopped at a neighborhood area, which is basically waiting for their time for going into the port, which is about a couple of kilometers away, so that creates congestion, security problems, physical security problems, so there are cameras that are there, that actually can monitor that if there are trucks parked there, but if there are people moving around, there’s a privacy filter that filters off the face and it says that there are people moving there, so what you’ve really focused on is the information of how you’re looking at that data and trying to then implement a privacy or a policy related item and those technologies are there and the options are there for people, but again, bringing it back to privacy and how we, how we are thinking about it from a technology standpoint, so some of our video sensing technology, we encrypt the data and keep it at the node where it, the information is and all you’re doing is you’re sending that, there’s a car park, there’s a car not parked. There’s traffic and here is a car that went in this, at this speed. That’s all we want to know, because that’s how you manage your congestion…

Chuck: Yeah, you’re sending back, you’re sending back a, you know, a yes or no in the database field and not the picture, not the image, not that. So if you translate the images into data, I could see that would be more acceptable by people.

Munish: Privacy compliant, but again, privacy itself is very, very personal and emotional. The amount of data you give to your retailers and the amount they know about what you do or your banks or even your social websites is much, much more — than what the government even as the technologies do…

Chuck: Well, there’s a pro, program out there, a program it’s a system called Geopedia, I don’t know if you ever heard of it, so Geopedia captures social media for Law Enforcement for, you know, “Hey, this guy wants a pizza, because he keeps tweeting about pizzas, let’s sell him more pizza, right.” They really started out the advertising business, but they really moved into the security field and saying, “Listen, here’s all the tweets and Instagram and Facebook posts from Paris and by the way, if we had this data, when the first lady at the airport at 7 am said, ‘Hey, I just heard an explosion’. If the cops had that, or watching it, maybe they could have got out there faster, maybe a different outcome, right.

So, it’s interesting that we don’t view our social media as private to your point about your kids, right. They think everything is open source. “Hey here is me at a party with my shirt off,” right. We don’t view that as private, but I think people assume it is, but it’s not… it’s out there. I mean I’m going to do a show, where we’re going to go over that whole Paris thing where we’re going to see all the live social media at the time, right. So, this is a really difficult situation and subject because it’s hard to, it’s hard to integrate people’s thoughts and emotions and feelings and make something work and you can’t make everybody happy, right.

Munish: Optionality, as long as you give the citizens an option for enabling them saying,” Okay if I have my wife and daughter walking in an unsafe neighborhood I want the camera, video camera looking at them and I want the police security. So, it’s optionality is I think what people…

Chuck: Yes, but here is what I, when you say that word, I like that word, okay, but when I put it back to security, it comes down to managing exceptions and eventually if you have too many exceptions to manage your rule goes away and the rule is, I am going to break this down to simple access control the rule is, you don’t come in a Cisco building without a badge and that’s the rule and it’s easy to implement, but we say oh if we got Chuck, but he has got a Security Guy Radio show we go let him in, the whole system collapses, right. So, and we’re doing policies we‘re sitting and talking about these things that do they have policies in place where they say, “Listen, this absolutely has to be a hard rule” or is it more about the option thing. I mean because you put the options in there and it can get lose. Does that make sense?

Munish: Yeah, but the options come in from people themselves, right. So, if you have a city and then that can get aggregated into the government and the process, so in Germany the policy, of the privacy thing is, you, I don’t want to be… I don’t want to be monitored by…

Chuck: So, citizen can participate in this?

Munish: Participate and then you define that policy and then that becomes the rule. Like you said Cisco badge nobody gets and if that’s the rule that everybody in Cisco feel that’s the best way to do it and then everybody follows that process so….

Anil: You know I think that there is such a thing as it’s a social contract that is emerging globally as to what should you know, about me and what is appropriate and that’s not just in the examples we’re using, it’s going to happen for everything, because we’re now saying a lot of things to our laptops to say it made my life a little easier in some ways, remember my passwords, remember, which sites I’ve gone to and I don’t know… The kinds of things that we put in place, but you know, let’s take the examples two things. One is Indonesia, tried a lot of stuff on predicting floods because they were having serious flood issues and when, when you have and when you live in a place that has flood issue you have a different appreciation your sense of privacy, if you’re stranded in particular, so they’ve tried predictive analytics with open data met, all the existing data past data and they realized that cloud sourcing was the most effective way of predicting and managing through flooding, so now they have created these open data platforms that the government used where their citizens are putting in the data.

Chuck: Interesting.

Anil: They are finding that to be more predictive. I, look at… ways, you know, the ways is absolutely fantastic because it’s crowd sourcing. Now suddenly you’re sitting in… If it gets better and better and you make that system, it’s going to kill that radar detector industry, because suddenly it says, “Police up ahead.”

Chuck: That right, that’s right.

Anil: What is amazing about that is, at some point, you could start putting, you know, when they say is this, was there really a police, was it something on the side and I believe that each of the individual way, ways guys, you’re going to register yourself as known or unknown, you will soon get some kind of eBay rating equivalent, will say that these people might get a higher levels of information earlier than somebody else that would be a monetization strategy that can emerge over time, so I think we still don’t know what we don’t know as these things evolve and very often when people complain about some companies for misusing data, sometimes it’s intentional, other times I don’t think it’s intentional they never thought about those implication.

Chuck: They never thought of the use, right. Yeah, that’s makes, that’s a brilliant point. I, one of the things I do is go around and I, lecture, do lectures about, you know, safety security stuff and then I consult with security department since because I ran Fox and Disney so I know a little bit about guards, right and every policy in many place I’ve ever gone to says,” Guards shall not have their cell phones turned on and shall not use their cell phones at work” and the first thing I do when I walk in and say, “You’re an idiot, you absolutely have to have their cell phones on and they have to be working and you better poke them into your Wi-Fi and a backup Wi-Fi by the way, because if some something goes to crap that’s your communication system, because your radios aren’t going to work, your phones aren’t going to work, because they are going to be over flooded, but if you had a private Twitter account, you guys could be tweeting pictures and data about the attack, about the flood, about the fire, they were so resistant to this idea, because the policy as you, we said very at beginning, the policy says no, we don’t allow that so I can’t change that and the decision maker who I’m talking to doesn’t have the authority to change the policy and so it sits there, this is really interesting.

Anil: Usually policies are written for the extremes, right. People who are going to misuse it the small percentage and so you change the policy for people who might be sitting and that’s why in companies they say we’re going to slow your video down, because people might be sitting and looking at porno at work and or surfing or watching YouTube videos which by the way you do know that a lot of people do but, the matter is in order to solve for that problem, you solve for it in such a heavy-handed way that you leave a lot of other good things on the wayside. You know, coming back to this point. You know, one of the things that I have seen and what we have seen as a group here, is that Europe was way ahead than America or any other, when it came to Smart Cities and discussion about — and if you look at the European countries a lot of what they talk about the Smart Cities has been to how do you maintain or enhance quality of life. If you go to emerging countries and you talk about Smart Cities it’s all about how do I create a standard of living middle class.

Chuck: Oh, interesting.

Anil: If you come to America which has been the slowest and the most resistant till recent and I would argue, I remember giving presentations on Smart Cities in America for three years ago, four years ago and I couldn’t get any bites from many cities, but in the last two and a half years they just exploded and the thing is in America bulk if not most of the discussions with cities so far have been about economic development, attracting talent, attracting investments and attracting people or keeping the people, so the moment you have that as your key drivers or outcome-based metrics a lot of the inputs on privacy, on security, on all those things changes if you’re in the middle class world mindset, which is of emerging countries, I can assure you security comes up, but more for a terrorism and all the other concerns.

Chuck: That’s what I was thinking, right.

Anil: In Europe, because the quality of life is a big issue, privacy becomes a big issue. In America and Munish can give you examples that are almost hysterical to a point, it’s all about data rights, but who owns the data and who is going to monetize the data, so it’s a very different set of discussions around data…

Chuck: That’s interesting, because guys were capitalized society and it is about making money, so it’s it… I didn’t think about the quality of life, what would the word be? Rural.

Anil: There’s a higher level of trust. Chuck, there is a higher level of trust by citizens on what their governments will do and what their government will do for them, so in Europe and many other parts of the world people trust the government a lot more. They are also willing to be pay a lot more of the taxes, so they are willing, not only do they pay higher taxes they know the government will offer them a service level that’s pretty high. In America traditionally there’s been this certain level of distrust or mistrust of the government and their governmental ability to deliver services, so the natural inclination is we would rather have the private enterprise do it than the government, so the Mayors are restricted in the ability to raise taxes, bonds and so what happens is the infrastructure investments become a very challenging thing in America and I have seen in Europe for example a lot of the cities are saying we’re not going to outsource our lighting poles, we are not going to outsource all of these. We want our cities to manage it and we are willing to pay the city managers because they’ll hire the right people to do it. In America you have many cities who are now thinking about outsourcing their lighting poles because that’s a way to manage the economic budget. Not necessarily at a quality of service.

Chuck: Very interesting, I was going to ask you. You already answered, you know. Why does America have the dumbest cities compared to other places and here’s the answer, it’s brilliant.

Munish: So, again if you start thinking about location and privacy and location is a big thing about, you don’t want to track your location, right and I had two questions. I’d asked two questions to my wife I said do you want to have an application that tracks your locations. She said absolutely not, so do you want an application that tells you when you’re near a retail shop that there is a good deal and you can go and pick up the dress you want absolutely, yes. It’s how you frame the problem…

Chuck: She’s being tracked either way, right.

Munish: It’s how you frame the problem.

Chuck: It’s very interesting, right.

Munish: I think that drives economic growth, or security or whatever the reasons it might be.

Chuck: So, let’s talk about some just nuts and bolts basic, right. Cities have budgets like private companies have budgets. You could put your Smart City into a place this big, Cisco is huge its many city blocks it’s very large, it’s a small city in a way, right, little town. I’m not asking for quotes and things, but do you think it’s the, do the costs make it resistant in one way or really it’s the privacy that makes it more resistant. When you come up, when you come out against it, that I see things getting cheaper and cheaper in a lot of ways, right, because technology is there, what’s you most resist is it the pricing or the whole…

Munish: I think it’s the process, it’s the process of how a city…

Chuck: Oh, the process because it’s too complicated people think about maybe.

Munish: Too complicated to procure and the process of how long it takes and RFPs and things of that kind and I think that’s really what’s limiting the speed of Smart City adoption globally and as you start thinking about public-private partnerships on how the private organizations are going to step into to help you to manage lights to save energy or help you to manage traffic congestion. You’re going to start seeing different models and acceleration of the whole Smart City adoption.

Chuck: So, I remember when I used to build things, I was on a construction projects, right, because I’ve been the Security guy and they say put your securities in this big building here, right and the first thing I always said is, “Where’s the future conduit?” They said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “I know you got conduit for this type of building. I want you put it a whole another system for conduit” “For what?” “Because ten years from now all of this stuff is going to be junk and I want a new conduit, whatever is new” “Well, what’s going to be new?” “I don’t have any idea what’s going to be new, but it’s going to be something new, right.” So, when you’re building a city, that’s new like you just talked about. That’s easy right, because you can start from the ground up, how do you handle changing existing infrastructure from a physical build out point of view? The best way to describe it right I mean, you can have wireless things, but it can be challenging, right.

Anil: Yeah, before, before Munish answers that I, what I want to do is I just want to take one point in there, which is, this whole idea of resistance and Munish is right, that there is a lot of resistance about process and all of that, but the first one is, a lot of people don’t know what they don’t know and where things are going and they’ve seen technology promises that didn’t really work out the way they thought it would work out in the past, so there’s always this uncertainty about the promises and all the, and cost reductions are more attractive than potential opportunities to gain revenue as we all know, not just in businesses, but also in personal life that people respond much more to anything that reduces the cost, so where they come back and what we always tell people is, just imagine, eight years ago, there was no or maybe nine years now that there was no iPhone and no iPad’s.

Chuck: How did we all live, how could that have been?

Anil: Today the life is different completely because of that, so we don’t know what seven years from now will come up and while the price is coming down on a per Gigabyte basis or per Mbps basis or per chip base, the fact that the — is becoming more, I’m sorry the Internet is becoming more video based Internet rather than a data based Internet.

Chuck: Now that’s interesting

Anil: That may change education, healthcare and the way we work and live, so where they come back is a, I don’t want to get started and get locked in on a technology that is obsolete, so they say, “We want you to take the risk company” so we say, “Then give us a 20 year lease or 20 year agreement so that we can plan accordingly. That changes their revenue procurement model, so very often they want that solution and they also want an OPEX and then when their procurement time comes, they want to decompose it down because the procurement office is still thinking, which is the lowest price and that changes the dynamics of the cycle if it’s longer, that’s one and the other one is that Mayors have to get reelected. They can talk about Smart Cities, but it is going to take eight years for the first impact of it. They may not be in their jobs, because they’re spending money, so they say, “Tell me something that we can do now that I can show the impact and then I can build on it, which is why lighting, potholes, traffic becomes very attractive.

Munish: The starting point of cities, in fact we are seeing a couple of two or three areas where the real starting points in cities. Number one is lighting.

Chuck: Makes sense. Yeah.

Munish: 30 feet above the ground, 25 meters away, the electricity there, there’s communication and cable there. You need network infrastructure, technology, electronics to connect all the sensing environment and as the whole transition, there are about four billion lights being transitioned from standard L, from standard halogen lights to LED lights.

Chuck: Four billion?

Munish: Four billion globally and every light pole, every time you’re upgrading it, if you’re not adding smart capability to it, you’re losing an opportunity of a few dollars per month per light pole and that amounts to over $3 trillion if you take it, take a look at it globally. You’re losing that opportunity, so now when you’re upgrading the lights, make sure they are smart. Make sure you created the connectivity there. Once you do that, you can offer a public Wi-Fi to citizens on the same network then you can start thinking about having the other sensors, environmental sensors instead of environmental agency procuring their own network and having the sensing of that environment, why not carry and look at the same network, so you use single entry point lighting or traffic upgrades and start looking at creating an open network and then starting to drive different technology adoptions.

Chuck: Would you say for Cisco that traffic and lighting are your easy cells, in a way, easier.

Munish: Security and traffic and lighting are the key insertions points.

Chuck: Are people asking about security more in a Smart City is that a bigger concern?

Munish: Absolutely. Especially because of how the Paris attacks…

Anil: For Cisco just so, you know, we have many players in the space obviously all the way from IT to non-IT players who are getting into Smart Cities. Our value proposition is very simple. We are not a vertical player, we are not a lighting solutions provider, we are not a traffic solutions provider, we partner with the ones who provide right solutions. Our job and what we are really good at, is as all of these things get connected as Internet of Things connects everything, then what happens is you’re going to drown in the sea of data and the majority of the data is useless. So, the idea of collecting the data and then shipping it back into a data warehouse where you do the analytics and then say, “Oh these are useless”. What we are saying is that you need responses that are quicker and at the point where the data is being collected, so as everything moves to the edge compute and storage and the analytics at this edge to respond to either a simple activity like a traffic instance management or a much more serious one where in a hospital for a surgery, or in a terrorist attack or some other kind of accident that requires medical attention.

What we’re saying is the more, you can put intelligence out in the network, the more they’re seamlessly connected the more that they are able to share the data in a systematic manner the better off you are. Mayors get it, everyone gets it, so we come back and saying we are not, we are not coming in and giving you analytics for those traffic we’re telling you whatever you choose as long as you keep them open standards, open platform that they can be connected in a systematic matter you cannot find a better partner who can seamlessly integrate those things in a way that is not only easy for them to be converged, but also that they are secure, because that is why we spend $13 billion a year on R&D plus M&A types of things to build that capability on a constant basis. So, the whole point is, we are, we are, we are investing so that you can have a very systematic and by the way, having said all of that we’re not suggesting that we are at a stage where it’s 100% secure, or there is not going to be to hack that and come in. In fact our Executive Chairman John Chambers famously said there are two types of companies.

Ones that have been hacked and the others who don’t know they have been hacked, so those are the only two kinds of companies, so the point is not whether you’re going to get hacked or whether hacking attempts are going to come in, some of us will have a higher level of hacking attempts than the others. The question is can we create a network that is secure at the edge, so that we can connect all these devices, all these individuals, all these processes that collects all this data and that is what our play is. We come in infrastructure up and we are saying we connect things at the base and then the software and the analytics on the top can come in that makes it much easier for infrastructure companies and for Mayors to understand, because they think in terms of roads, they think in terms of street lights, they think in terms of parking spaces and so we just say “Can, you connect them in a way that you can come up with new insights and new monetization. For example 40% of all public parking spaces in a city goes wasted because you don’t know they exists and by the way parking is number two or number three revenue source for a city. Well it’s a very simple story when you go in and say, “Why don’t we connect the parking lots, we put them into a Cloud platform, make it accessible for anyone coming in, to look for what is the closest parking space that is available today to the location they want to get too, so they’re not driving around for two or three hours looking for spaces in there.

Chuck: I’ll take two, maybe three of these. I want to buy three of them. Gentlemen, been a fascinating discussion. This is very, very interesting and I’m honored have interviewed you guys. I think Cisco has the right idea and I look forward to more discussions about this.

Blue Line Baby: Chronicles of a Cop’s Kid is a lighthearted look at growing up as the child of a California Highway Patrol Officer in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The career of the author’s father, Dale Waaler, is relived through the eyes of his daughter in this tale of a career spanning over 30 years from the LAPD to CHP. From life in the academy, to traveling abroad with former President Ronald Reagan, or the delicate art of dating a cop’s daughter, and even the Secret Service manhandling a tardy young man at their front door – these personal tales provide a fascinating glimpse into life of growing up with an officer of the law.

Chuck Harold & Guests

Christa Trinchera Blue Line Baby

John Chigos Platesmart.com

Paul Bristow SecurityGuyRadio.com

Chuck HaroldThe Security Guy

Tom: 0px;”>Full text of radio show

Please forgive any typos, this podcast was transcribed by my typing pool comprised of volunteer stalkers.

Chuck: Welcome to a belated start time. Sorry for the technical…we had some glitches with the Facebook page, but we’re streaming live on Facebook, the Chuck Harold Facebook page as well and it’s been shared by our guest. Christa, how are you?

Christa: I’m doing well, thank you.

Chuck: Now, this is a very special edition, we’re going to call this the Blue Line edition, because of lot of things with police officers today. We’re going to be speaking with Christa about Blue Line Baby, which, can we see that Jarvis, can we see that shot? That’s great. It’s chronicle of a cop’s kid, you were a cop’s kid in the 70s…

Christa: Yes.

Chuck: And I think this is really, I only read a little bit because I was kind of pressed for time today, but it’s really fascinating. Tell me a little bit about your daughter because this is…how we got connected was this. I’m tweeting, you know, what, those ridiculous tweets I do Paul all the goofy stuff I do right…

Paul: Yeah, well I’ve turned you off so…

Chuck: You have turned me off you little…

Paul: Oh, yeah.

Chuck: Mad bastard anyway, so I’m tweeting something about the show and register for a free show and so on and instantly when I hit this button, some young lady replies, you should have my mom on your show and I go “Oh, okay, well that’s, that’s a pretty bold. ”

Christa: She’s my agent.

Chuck: Yeah and I replied, “Well, I’d like to have her on our show” and then she gave me a link and I looked at it and that’s how we got connected.

Christa: Yeah.

Chuck: Tell us about your daughter, because this is going to tie into something we’re going to do in a minute it’s really, it’s amazing what she does.

Christa: Yes. She’s an amazing young lady, my daughter Carissa has developmental disability, but she has an amazing connection to the Law Enforcement Community through Special Olympics and the Law Enforcement Torch Run and Law Enforcement has been raising money for Special Olympics for the past 30 years. It raised half a billion dollars.

Chuck: Half a billion?

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Christa: Half a billion dollars.

Chuck: Oh, my…

Christa: For Special Olympics, so she started an organization called Athletes for Officers as a way to give back to Law Enforcement and to kind of help them in times of need. So she raises money for officers that are injured, she helps pay for ballistic vests for K-9s, she helps raise money to purchase new K-9s for departments, so it’s pretty amazing. She’s an amazing young lady.

Chuck: You say there is this, I don’t want to call it disability, but I would never notice looking at her talking to her or…

Christa: Right.

Chuck: Watching the post and stuff, I mean it’s amazing is she like 15-ish?

Christa: She’s 23.

Chuck: Oh, she’s 23.

Christa: She’s…

Chuck: I thought oh, I got your other daughter mixed, okay I made a mistake all right so, but I mean, she started this very young right and for a young person to do that, that’s…

Christa: She did, you know, she, her very dear friend was a Law Enforcement Officer who was killed in the line of duty and this was her way of honoring him was to start Athletes for Officers in his memory and so it’s very near and dear to her heart and she works very hard to make sure that her officers know how much they are loved and supported.

Chuck: Now this is a complete weird coincidence, Paul because of the book I was doing. The interview, this was booked couple of weeks ago and a couple of weeks before that I got contacted by another organization, the Patriotic Service Dog Foundation.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Chuck: Remember, when we had veterans moving forward that was the other service dog…

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Chuck: …foundation, right. So, there’s just this great connection between the service dogs and police and the Blue Line, all that kind of stuff and so I want to interrupt your show just for a minute.

Christa: Sure.

Chuck: We’re going to go to our little Skyping guest here, Tom Tackett, is Tom on there Jarvis? Can you hear me, Tom?

Tom: Yes, I can.

Chuck: Hey, welcome, welcome to the show.

Tom: Thank you.

Chuck: So, Tom, Tom runs the Patriot Service Dog Foundation and he is at tackettservicedogs.com, and we want, Tom wanted to talk about the American Ride & Musical Festival that’s coming up this May 21st, 22nd this Saturday, Sunday, is that right?

Tom: Correct. It’s Armed Forces Day, Saturday.

Chuck: Yeah and where, in Orange County where is that going to be?

Tom: It’s going to be at Lake Irvine, Lakeview Park.

Chuck: Yeah and I was speaking with you guys on the phone yesterday, give us a little bit about how, you know, how it works so we, you know, we have a ride down there. We, it all culminates at the music festival it’s really an interesting…

Tom: Yeah, it’s going to be a fun two day event, it’s called The America Ride And Music Festival and it starts Saturday morning with a ride from Lifestyle Cycles in Anaheim to the event site and it’s going to be, we’re hoping 500 to 1000 motorcycles and the City of Anaheim has really gotten behind this and they’re going to close down State College Boulevard, which is where Lifestyle Cycles is and so we can stage the bikes and then the highway patrol is going to escort us down the freeway to the event site led by the Anaheim fire truck and then fueled by the fallen organization, which is five charger vehicles that have all of the 9/11 victims on the cars.

Chuck: Oh, I saw those, in Glendale, yeah, those are right, those are right amazing vehicles…

Tom: Yeah, it’s really cool.

Chuck: Very nice and this is all to raise money for the Patriot Service Dog Foundation.

Tom: Correct, which we train dogs for our wounded veterans, service dogs.

Chuck: Now your service dogs, you talk about the physically wounded and the other organization we talked about was PTSD, do you do both or mostly the wounded, physically…

Tom: No, we do PTSD, TBI and Mobility.

Chuck: Excellent. Now we have a little video, it’s about five minutes on, Jarvis, you got that video ready and Tom I want to play this, this is a video about your organization and…

Tom: Okay, great.

Chuck: By the way everybody is free to come to this, right. You can get your bike and come on down and join?

Tom: Oh, absolutely, you don’t have to be a rider at all. It’s open to the family, it’s going to be kids zone. It’s really going to be fun, it’s going to be music all-day, both days, various guest speakers, motivational speakers, gosh, everything that you could imagine of being at a festival like this.

Chuck: Well, Paul that little three wheeler you bring to the grocery store and shop with you, you could bring it in and if you want to.

Paul: Yeah, I know yeah.

Chuck: Yeah, you should get that, put some little…

Paul: Speedy Gonzales.

Chuck: All right Jarvis, can you roll that video and we’ll be back in about five minutes, take a look at this about the Patriotic Service Dog Foundation.

Glen: A lot of the problems I had with PTSD, I didn’t want to be around people. I avoided loved ones, I couldn’t hold a relationship.

Katie: I would go home, not have any energy. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, I wasn’t working out I wasn’t performing well at work, all the answers I could find weren’t helping me at all.

Milan: In 2011, I was coming back from my Listening Post Observation Post Patrol and I, stepped on an IED losing my right leg and my left leg, right leg above the knee, left leg below the knee. I’ve been diagnosed with mild PTSD, I was sick and tired of trying to being a grown man and I drop a fork and I can’t pick it up. I crossed path with Tom Tack, in Tackett Service Dogs and I entertained the idea of getting a service dog.

Tom: So he came to me and interviewed him and decided we would get him a dog and train the dog for him at no charge.

Milan: I was fortunate enough to get my own dog, you know, I always wanted to help out, other guys that have been through the same thing I have, so, you know, making the transition over the training was easy.

Tom: So we trained several dogs for these veterans that needed them. These guys really couldn’t afford to pay for these dogs and I wasn’t about to turn them away because they didn’t have the other money. Some friends of ours watched what we were doing and approached me and said, “Tom, you know, we want to help. Why don’t we start a non-profit to help support Tackett Service Dogs, so we could provide and train more dogs and do a better job at it, and so we did and we named it Patriotic Service Dog Foundation.

Milan: Patriotic Service Dog Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides service dogs fully trained at little or no cost to the veterans. It’s kind of the infancy phase of, you know, something like this where, you know, it’s all about just getting the name out there and trying to raise funds that we can actually help these guys.

Del: The training process for a dog is a minimum of a year and a half to be certified. The cost of a fully trained service dog is $20,000. It’s a lot of money, but that’s food, that’s vet dose, that’s training and these dogs are with us 24/7, and we’re not receiving any grants from the government, any help from the State or anything. This is all 100% donation funded. Training of a service dog depends on the needs of the person all the dogs are required to perform a minimum of three tasks that mitigate somebody’s disability, so for instance like Milan’s dog Brody she is a mobility animal, so she is trained to go get keys for him, so he won’t fall out of his chair if he is reaching for something. If there is a light switch he can’t reach she’ll run over there and flip the light switch on or off for him. Then you’ve got your psychiatric service dogs that we do especially for a lot of the guys with PTSD.

Glen: The name of my dog is Indi, short for Independence. Once we created a bond, she brought me back into the world. She helped me get into more social situations easier. She helped me feel more comfortable with living alone by myself. She wakes me up out of bad dreams, she gives me the reason to live again.

Del: Dobby is there, I know she’s going to watch my back and I don’t have to be afraid. It really brings joy to my life.

Tom: Patriotic Service Dog Foundation’s motto is “22 to zero” and what that represents is 22 veterans a day commits suicide and our goal is to make that zero. To this point anybody that’s received a service dog from us has not committed suicide. We have found that the veterans that have completed our course and have their dogs at home with them have gotten off most of the medications if not all of them.

Milan: One of the primary painkillers I was on was Methadone, so I had heroin withdrawals for about two months. Just trying to get off of that medication and I will never take that again, I will never take any of that medication again…

Richard: I just feel lot more comfortable having a big German shepherd with you and I’ve found that it helped better have than half the medication they try to give you.

Glen: As a veteran, I was hurting for way too long, and I know there’s, other people out there. Just like me, my brothers and sisters that are in pain and if I can spread some of this awareness myself and if we can do it through Patriotic Service Dog Foundation that know that these animals help people, they help me, and I’m not the only one in pain, if anyone is out there looking for one of these dogs that needs help, you come to this organization you talk to Tom Tackett and I guarantee you’re going to create a bond and you’re going to find that brotherhood you once had and it’s one of those things that once you get that again you’re going to feel alive again.

Tom: We would love to help them if we can simply by going into patrioticservicedogfoundation.org just contact us and if we can help we absolutely will.

Katie: Dobby, she means the world to me, and I’m trying hard to give her as much of a good life as she’s given me. I don’t know how I was able to live without her in the past and this organization.

Milan: A lot of people don’t get to go home and say, you know, I’ve really affected somebody’s life today. It’s such a great feeling to be able to do that every single day, I couldn’t ask for anything else. Plus, I get to help guys that have been through what I’ve been through, and you know it’s kind of like helping me get better by helping them.

Glen: I can honestly say that the Patriotic Service Dog Foundation had saved my life.

Speaker: To support the Patriotic Service Dog Foundation visit us online and check out TheAmericaRide.com to find out more about our two day fundraiser in Silverado, California on May 21st and 22nd.

Chuck: Tom, thank you very much. That’s a very great video, very moving.

Tom: Oh, thank you very much.

Chuck: Very nice.

Tom: You did a good job on it.

Chuck: How much does a dog cost these days to get them up and running?

Tom: Well, typically a minimum of $20,000 if we start with a puppy and train them all the way up through certification at a minimum of 18 months, that’s for the purchase of the dog if we need to buy them, vet bills, food, training, supplies just whatever the dog may need to get the finished product.

Chuck: Well this is a great cause and unfortunately I’ll be in San Francisco doing some other shows, but I would’ve like to come down and cover it, but next year for sure.

Tom: Absolutely.

Chuck: So everybody who are going to go to the americanride.com. Tom is at the best place to find info?

Tom: Sure, americanride.com for the ride this weekend and hope to see you there.

Chuck: Alright, Tom Tackett, Patriotic Service Dog Foundation, tackettservicedogs.com, americanride.com and music festival that’s May 21st and 22nd this weekend, so make sure you guys go down and support, bring your motorcycles, your cars, just show up and have a lot of fun and be a great…

Paul: I’m going to drive…

Chuck: Bring your tricycle down there.

Tom: Tricycles are welcome.

Chuck: Tom, thanks for Skyping in.

Tom: Thank you, thanks for having me.

Chuck: We’ll catch you later, right. All right, back to the case at hand, there was that — I’m buying you a Fay Button for Christmas. What is it, are you kidding?

Jarvis: I was standing to applaud.

Chuck: Yeah, but people don’t just stop applaud they fade their applause…

Jarvis: We will do that if talking…

Chuck: How am I going to fake people into our live audience here.

Jarvis: …just talking nobody will even know.

Chuck: Oh, okay talk and nobody knows yeah, nobody knows that so we were cut off anyway all right so we’re back with Christa now say your name out loud for me.

Christa: Trinchera.

Chuck: Trinchera, because it’s Italian, right.

Christa: It’s Italian.

Chuck: Author of Blue Line Baby Chronicles of a Cop’s Dad, Chronicles of your life as a child growing up in the ‘70s as a police officer child now.

Christa: Yeah.

Chuck: I read part of it and I was kind of pressed for time, but it’s very easy to read and it’s just, it’s just a nice warm feeling when you get reading this. My kids might have a different approach. They might not have thought it was such a great thing I don’t know, in this day, because I was always about protecting them I was like oh, man, everybody is, you know, a crazy world out there, right.

Christa: It’s true, it’s true.

Chuck: Yeah, so tell us about your dad, tell us what inspired this and how you came to write it?

Christa: Well I had the privilege of attending “National Police Week” two years ago.

Chuck: That’s in Washington D.C.

Christa: In Washington D.C. Unfortunately we were there to add the name of a fallen hero who was a close friend. While he was there I was experiencing all of the pomp and circumstance surrounding National Police Week and yesterday was National Peace Officers Memorial Day. So it was very surreal being there and taking it all in, and I started thinking about my dad’s career, and what an amazing career he had, and I started thinking about, you know, policing today, it’s very different.

Chuck: It is.

Christa: And my dad was an officer in the ’60s, ‘70s, ‘80s he retired in the ‘90s, so being an officer in the ‘60s and ’70s, you know, was, we’re talking 1-Adam-12 and CHiPs. I mean they were rock stars. It’s very different today.

Chuck: It’s true when cops drove down my street in the ‘70s, everybody waved at them, they said hi, they got out of the cars they said hi to you and I’m not saying that’s the police’s fault that it doesn’t happen now as much, I think it’s a cultural shift it’s sad.

Christa: It is, it is. I really wanted to document my dad’s career, kind of as a way of just telling the story of what it was like back then. Some of the things that he faced as an officer in that era and what it was like through my eyes as a child of a police officer and we grew up differently.

Chuck: Now did you feel that though at that time. Do you think it was different?

Christa: Oh, absolutely.

Chuck: Now, why so? Besides the fact that you lived in all of the old Redwood Forest that was no kids to play with, that’s why, we’ll get to that part of the story later, but initially what was the difference?

Christa: My family all wore badges. You know, we didn’t have relatives around us, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have family. The officers that my dad worked with, his sergeants they were all our family and they embraced us as such and so I knew that the other kids in school they didn’t have that same experience and it wasn’t always positive. I mean growing up in a small town and essentially your dad has arrested the majority of your friend’s parents that was the negative, but for the most part, you know, it was really fun. I mean, you know, as a youngster I grew up shooting guns and loading bullets and I think in my, in kindergarten, you know, I was in the sandbox teaching my friends how to weigh gun powder, we just grew up different, you know.

Chuck: Well, I remember my kids were very young right before I retired, I used to take them to station, put them in the car and they got a big kick out of it and stuff and they are, some of their friends knew what I did, or they come to the house and they were scared to death, and they were also very…

Paul: Well nice to know.

Chuck: Well the actual sill are as a matter of fact, but not scared from a, you know, not that I’m not going to help them or not, it’s just that, oh he’s a cop and what does that mean and you know, you know, they are all good kids, right.

Christa: Right, right.

Chuck: I think it’s sad that now the perception is that the police are not there to help you and Paul you got the London Bobby Model where police are helpful.

Paul: Well yeah, but that’s changed a little bit.

Chuck: Has it? Okay.

Paul: Yeah it’s definitely changed over the years, you know, unfortunately, but yeah, I mean I think it still is more of a social, you know, thing police power. You probably have that in a smaller community. You probably really got that social power where you are a police officer to help people and you….

Christa: Yes.

Paul: Work hard at the social services really.

Christa: Yes.

Chuck: So, we went to the LAPD academy today for the show.

Christa: We did.

Chuck: Because that’s where your dad graduates in 1960 you said?

Christa: 1960 he was the youngest recruit in his graduating class, he was 21 years old.

Chuck: And then he transferred to…?

Christa: California Highway Patrol in the 1966.

Chuck: Oh, from LAPD, I thought it was one at the middle, so LAPD to Highway Patrol then was rest of his career, right?

Christa: Yes.

Chuck: So, you know, just tell us about him what kind of career he have what did he do, what he work?

Christa: He had a very interesting career. Like I said he started with LAPD, and you know, it was really fun. Especially now as an adult looking back and saying, gosh, you know, my dad was the original 1-Adam-12. You know, he and his partner were actually assigned 1-Adam-12.

Paul: Oh, seriously

Chuck: Oh, really.

Christa: Seriously.

Chuck: Oh, that’s amazing.

Christa: Seriously they were the original, you know, in 1961…

Chuck: One’s Parker Center, right.

Paul: You know I’ve got no idea.

Chuck: I think one’s Parker Center headquarters A is Adam it’s a two man unit, and then 12 is the car number.

Christa: Yeah.

Chuck: So, that’s

Paul: …watching zeck cars when I was a kid.

Chuck: Yeah.

Christa: Yeah.

Paul: A little bit different.

Chuck: Little different.

Christa: It was really fun later, you know, because I used to watch Adam 12 as a kid, but I didn’t really put to two and two together, you know, cruising it was different back them. You know, he had a 1962 Pontiac later a two barrel carburetor I mean they had some souped up cars back then. You know, they wore racing straps and helmets and cruising speed was 120 miles an hour. I mean it was just…

Paul: Did he say things like just affects man?

Chuck: Well I don’t think so. I don’t think if they got a helmet on you don’t need to say that.

Christa: He worked Juvenile Division, he worked the Pasadena freeways.

Chuck: That was assignment, oh that’s was probably new back then the 110…

Paul: It’s probably the only Freeway wasn’t it?

Chuck: Well it might’ve been…yeah.

Christa: Yeah, after being assigned to Juvenile division he really had a tough time, you know, kind of coping with the way the system worked.

Chuck: How, how long did he work that, couple of years?

Christa: Couple of years, he didn’t, you know, you see the same kids and going back into the same situations that was difficult.

Chuck: Either being arrested or being victims or yeah that’s tough.

Paul: That was bad then.

Christa: That was back then.

Paul: I imagine what it’s like right now.

Christa: Yeah that was back then. Yeah, so he, he decided to make a change and well, prior that, he was in, in the Watts Riots, so that was, that was kind of a…

Chuck: Oh, that’s interesting.

Christa: A piece of history while he was with LAPD, yeah. It was August 11th, 1965, the Watts riots, you know, a 46 square-mile combat zone. It was pretty intense even back then, you know, six days of just absolute mayhem, and my mom was the dispatcher.

Chuck: Oh, that’s interesting.

Christa: With LAPD, yeah.

Chuck: They met at work?

Christa: They met at work, yeah.

Chuck: How romantic is it? Jarvis isn’t that romantic or…?

Paul: Did they meet over the, was he in a car and she was talking to him and they knew or…

Christa: He liked.

Chuck: Her voice?

Christa: The sound of her voice…

Paul: 1-Adam-12, 1-Adam-12. Oh, I’m in love with that woman.

Chuck: Well, voices are very powerful, that’s why I don’t let, Jarvis talk anymore because all the chicks want to call and talk to him because of his deep voice, deeper than mine is, that’s not good, but I get it, I get it.

Christa: Well and dispatches the lifeline, so…

Chuck: Exactly, very important, yeah, you know.

Christa: Yeah, so he went into to meet the woman behind the voice and the rest is history so…

Chuck: That is really, that’s a great story. That’s a great story.

Christa: It is. It is so in 1966, he entered the California Highway Patrol.

Chuck: So, kind of after the riots it was like, you know what a change.

Christa: Yeah, yeah he, he was ready for a change. So, you know, joining the California Highway Patrol is, it was interesting because growing up with the academy and learning all there is to learn about the CHP. When I was writing this book I got to hear some stories that I had never heard before. For instance, when my dad entered the academy he had to bring his own firearm.

Chuck: Oh, well.

Christa: So, he brought with him his own Colt Python.

Paul: All right. A man after my own heart.

Chuck: This guy, this guy is right out of central casting — he’s got a Colt Python.

Paul: Proper gun.

Chuck: A Plymouth two barrel. Yeah 1-Adam- 12, well the guys he’s like a movie cop.

Christa: Well, it definitely Jarvis, do we have the picture of my dad on LAPD. Yeah, he, and he looked the part, he looked the part. So, you know, he graduated in late 1966 and was assigned to Golden Gate Division and he was, he had 51 other classmates that were also assigned to Golden Gate Division and for the first two weeks they worked graveyard shift and they were working five officers to a car. Can you imagine what that was like being pulled over?

Chuck: Wait, wait, wait five officers to a car?

Christa: Five officers to a car.

Paul: What was it or what oh, I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Christa: Can you imagine when they pulled someone over, all five of them getting out at the same time.

Chuck: Well, that’s a safest damn traffic stop in the….

Paul: Yeah imagine there big cars in those days.

Chuck: Well, that’s true. They were –man, that’s like, that’s like going to do drivers Ed in high school that will be pretty [indiscernible] depending on whose driving.

Christa: So do you suppose they did row shamble to see who got to sit with bad guy if they had to book someone I don’t know.

Chuck: That’s so strange. I mean, maybe it’s a, was it a budget thing, what was it?

Christa: They had so many at the time that they were breaking in.

Chuck: Just a high class at that time, oh I see high class.

Paul: So, the Golden Gate is that, so that’s San Francisco, right.

Christa: Yes San Francisco.

Paul: So there’s five people in a car and they are going up and down those hills, like you see on Clint Eastwood movies.

Christa: So, after his first two weeks assigned to Golden Gate, he was assigned to be a break-in officer because he had prior Law Enforcement experience.

Chuck: Now is that a training officer kind of or…?

Christa: Yes and so he was training his fellow classmates. How about that?

Chuck: Interesting, very interesting. Hey, you know, hold that thought one second. We can take a break, Jarvis it’s about 7:30 right. So, we’re going to play a little quick video which is a terrorist update, remember John from PlateSmart couple of weeks ago?

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Chuck: So, he did a little video for us. We wanted just to chime in here, take a quick break. We’ll be back in a minute Security Guy Radio watch this terrorism update from John of PlateSmart.

John: This report was published by a group called Action on Armed Violence. In this report, unacceptable harm, they showed that over 33,000 civilian deaths were attributed to explosive devices in 2015. This is a 54% increase over the numbers from 2011. This report is pretty dramatic in the fact that it shows that our threat from terrorism is growing, it’s not decreasing as we are being led to believe by other groups. In addition, over 9000 individuals were killed by suicide bombers in 2015 alone. This is a number that is much larger than the previous year. We do know that terrorism is growing worldwide. We know that it’s a threat here in the United States.

We have to look at new technologies here in the United States because ISIS has shown itself to be an adaptable smart intelligent terrorist group. They no longer use traditional methodologies of communication that we can readily intercept with electronic means, so we have to look at indicators of intent. We know that they do not wear uniforms, which is another major indicator, so what do we do, we have to look at technology such as video analytics. Video analytics are great indicator of intent why because they take uncommon behavior such as a vehicle driving around the building six or seven times and all of a sudden stopping in front of that building and then blowing up. That’s the Timothy McVeigh situation.

Had we utilized LPR, we could have identified that situation and said that this vehicle has done this activity we need to start utilizing this type of technology in much greater numbers here domestically in order to identify these groups that would do harm to us. We know that these groups are growing in strength.

We have over 1000 active investigations against ISIS members as of 2015. We know that they’re recruiting in all 50 states, so they are growing much faster than our methodologies by which we can identify them, so through the use of ALPR technologies and other video analytic technologies, we can start to identify indicators of intent and that’s what exactly these technologies provide us. Unfortunately, we do not have these technologies fully deployed at this time, but as we start to deploy these technologies in greater numbers. The technology itself will start to indicate who these people are and will help us identify these events before they can occur and hopefully we can prevent the next 9/11 from occurring.

Chuck: All right, welcome back to Security Guy Radio with my guest Christa Waaler Trinchera, Did I get it right?

Christa: Trinchera.

Chuck: Trinchera, darn I can’t get the Italian names right. I can’t get the Italian names right. I’m, it’s, I am not making fun, I’m, I really can’t get it right.

Christa: That’s quite all right.

Chuck: I’m sorry, but anyway it’s…

Christa: But you called Waaler correct, most people don’t get that one.

Chuck: I want to get Waaler right, that’s good.

Chuck: Well, we’re talking about “Chronicles of a Cop’s Kid” this is a recollection of your life growing up as a child of a police officer.

Christa: Yes.

Chuck: Who, your dad is a, you dad he is like a star right, he is like 1-Adam-12. He’s in the riots, he’s, what was the other one? He had the…

Paul: Yeah, he had the well I don’t know I don’t know what you’re talking about…

Chuck: No, there’s, three things you talked about that right, oh, that is Colt Python.

Christa: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Paul: Oh, yeah, no I’m sorry.

Chuck: Yeah, no, that’s all right.

Paul: Yeah, but that I was in, that was at when he joined the CHP is that right.

Christa: Yes, when he, when he came on to CHP in 1966, yeah he had been carrying a Colt Python.

Chuck: Now he was an assigned at San Francisco, where were you guys living?

Christa: Well, I wasn’t born yet.

Chuck: Okay all right.

Christa: My mom remained in Los Angeles area.

Chuck: Okay, she was still a dispatcher with LAPD.

Christa: She was still with LAPD. My dad came down Bolton Park and was working freeways and then put in for a transfer to a resident post in the northernmost point of California on the Oregon border.

Chuck: Oh, by Weed up there?

Christa: North of Weed, yes.

Chuck: That’s pretty north. It was North, Weed.

Paul: So, why did he do there?

Christa: You know they wanted to get out of Los Angeles. They had my older brother who was just an infant at the time and they really wanted to raise a family outside of Los Angeles.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Christa: So they decided to go up North, way up North.

Chuck: Well, you know that, that’s in the 70’s and he had, he had a lot of perception to think about it then, because in 70’s it was kind of a cool place, wasn’t too bad, but he could see it coming.

Christa: He could see it coming.

Paul: Like My Irish Uncle Jack used to say, “If God was going to give the world an enema, he’d stick in Los Angeles” He did not like Los Angeles.

Paul: Or, he already is.

Chuck: Yeah, maybe, maybe He already has. That’s great.

Paul: Oh, I’ll just add a walk down there is…

Christa: Right.

Chuck: So, you were born in this little town, so you are a small town girl.

Christa: I was born in Oregon in Klamath Falls, Oregon, because it was the closest hospital, they had to go over the border to get to the hospital, but yes, it was a small town USA. My dad was the resident post officer, he was one of two.

Chuck: Explain me what that means, to my nieces and nephews.

Christa: Resident post officer is you operate out of your home. He had a division office that dispatching what not was housed at, but he parked the patrol car in the driveway. He was on call 24/7. Dispatch would ring the phone if he wasn’t in the car and he would put on his uniform and be called out.

Paul: Now was there a lot of police, so did he have to a little station in there or was it just a house?

Christa: It was just a house. He did have a small office where he would write his reports and then he would go into Yreka the closest office and…

Chuck: That’s a great town.

Christa: Yeah, and deliver his reports and that’s where he would book any prisoners if he had prisoners he would have to drive them to Yreka…

Chuck: So, your town was about, how far out of Yreka. Hour?

Christa: An hour and a half…depending on the snow.

Chuck: Oh, yeah. The snow…

Christa: I mean this was the ‘70s so we had lots of snow, icy conditions, it was mountainous territory. Lot of log truck accidents and…

Chuck: So, he is the sole police officer for what 1,000 square miles or something like that?

Christa: Yeah hundreds of square miles.

Chuck: Hundreds yeah.

Christa: At least.

Chuck: And his back-up is what an hour away on a good day.

Christa: Maybe.

Chuck: If they’re, rolling out of Yreka yeah.

Christa: If we had to and he could call on Fish and Game or Caltrans were typically.

Chuck: Well, I’d want Caltrans. That’s number one thing, I would be…I mean. That doesn’t warm your heart to think that Caltrans is the only, but listen anyway that helps you for your dad.

Christa: Forest service, often times, you know, because of the mountaineer stream he wouldn’t have radio signal.

Chuck: Oh, my gosh.

Christa: So, my mom had a CB in the house and she would call a fire lookout when they have these tall towers…

Chuck: So, that’s right in the forest. Yeah, people live in those days, yeah.

Christa: On the tall peaks and she would call one of the lookout operators and ask them to use their big binoculars and ask if they could see my dad anywhere and just that she could know that he was okay, you know, because he would work an accident for, you know, sometimes 18 hours.

Chuck: That was fatal.

Paul: There’s no GPS or anything like that

Christa: No cell phones, no oftentimes no radios, so yeah, you know, and it was frigid cold weather so he would have the spikes on the bottom of his shoes and all of the cold weather gear and yeah, it was an interesting time. It was…

Chuck: Now, did he ever have a time where he needed some back up and you know, it took a long time to get there or any close calls stories like that, I mean.

Christa: Oh, sure, I mean, he had plenty of issues that, you know, he would well he didn’t really have CHP Backup very close by but he would definitely call in, you know, Fish and Game or Forest Service to come and lend a hand, but you know he…

Chuck: What kind of cases did he have, what kind of things happen I mean, accidents are one thing, but I mean was it wild marijuana parties in the forest or something or what?

Christa: No, there was one story that I write about in the book, where a large bull had been hit by a car and was seriously injured, and so, you know, this was farmland, this was farm country this was someone’s bread-and-butter. So, my dad responded, it’s a highway hazard, so he responds and this bull is, it’s still alive, but it’s not going to make it, so out of respect for the owner of this bull they have to identify the brand, call someone that has a brand book…

Chuck: Oh, geez.

Christa: And call the farmer to come out what do you want to do with this, with this bull, well let’s put him out of his misery, so my dad decides to, you know, put one between the eyes.

Chuck: With the Colt Python?

Christa: With the Python…

Christa: And the bull gets up.

Chuck: After he shot him?

Christa: After he shot him.

Chuck: Oh, that’s a pissed off bull.

Christa: And charges them and so they’re doing a Round Robin sort of thing around the patrol car and he leans in and he had a big slug that he carried for situations as such and he was able to take down this really angry bull.

Paul: That’s a 1000 pound animal.

Christa: Yeah and it was not taking too kindly to being shot between the eyes. So, but those are the kinds of, you know, you never knew he would find, you know, this was back in the early ‘70s and you could, where kindness went a long way, and so you would have a lot of people passing through that, would have car trouble or they would have an accident and it would take a day, or two, or three to get parts in for the repairs to be done and what not and in one case there was a young college student, she was on her way to Portland or to, you know, go to school and she, her car breaks down and you know, it’s late at night, and no cell phones back then, so she doesn’t have any money and so, you know, my dad winds up bringing her to our house and my mom sits up with her and they’re trying to reach her parents and you know, today if you did that could you imagine…

Chuck: No, couldn’t. We couldn’t unfortunately.

Christa: But, you know, back then when you are in a little tiny town and it was all about just reaching out and helping people, you know, it was being, it was being a good steward of what you’re given. So, you know, my dad was always that kind of person he was always going the extra mile.

Chuck: Oh, he is still is by the way, he is still with…

Christa: He still is.

Chuck: All right, want to talk about in a present tense.

Christa: Yes, yes.

Chuck: The same.

Christa: But when he was working in the road…

Chuck: Yeah, yeah.

Christa: When he was working in the road, you know, his trunk was like he had everything under the sun in there.

Chuck: You have to you got to be so survival.

Christa: Right. You know, he had all kinds of antifreeze and you name it he had it in that trunk.

Chuck: Let’s talk about dispatching, right. So, he’s a resident and he lives in the house that’s his police station. When he gets a call he rolls. Is he just kind of doing general patrol when he is not getting a call?

Christa: Yes. He would patrol the beat, looking for speeders, you know, we were near a bug inspection station, because we were near the border so people that didn’t stop, you know, for the proper inspection of their produce or what have you that they were bringing into the state, you know, those kinds of situations. Yeah, it was back then CHiPs was just becoming a phenomenon, and so people would stop they would flag him down and he would think, oh, you know, motorist needs help, they just wanted to picture with him.

Chuck: Oh, because of the TV show.

Christa: Because of the television show CHiPs. You know, in 1977 when CHiPs became popular California Highway Patrol became like rock stars.

Chuck: Yeah, it’s true.

Christa: So, you know, people were pulling over and he’s trying to write a citation and people are stopping on the outside of the freeway to take a picture. You know a far cry from where we are we are today, very far cry.

Chuck: Well, let’s talk about let’s talk about image briefly, because this ties into your painting an amazing image of what public service is and what it should be. Not dissimilar to the Bobbies back in the day when it was all about help and they didn’t have to carry guns or kind of stuff, right and it’s different now.

Christa: It’s very different.

Chuck: It is just. Here is what I think is different. Paul maybe you disagree, I think the cops are the same. Cops are basically the same throughout history. They are all kind of same. We’re little [indiscernible] [0:37:14], but we’re helpful, we want to protect ourselves as all these things going out the same time.

Paul: Well, most coppers get into the business because they want to help people that is.

Chuck: They want to help people, that’s it.

Christa: It’s not what they do it’s who they are.

Chuck: Right. It’s who they are. It’s a very good way to put it.

Christa: It’s who they are.

Chuck: The media now wants to change that into, we are going to define you as something else. That’s wrong. I don’t think that’s what happening, but it’s not a police officer’s nature to really kind of walk around, piss one of our stuffs, so they’re quite maybe and they just do their job heroically, quietly and the media controls the image and does your dad ever watch things on TV now and say, you know what back in the days that’s not how we did it, and you know, that kind of things he miss it, he probably still misses it.

Christa: I don’t think he misses it.

Chuck: No, okay. Forget, kill cows in the middle of winter, I might not have seen it but…

Christa: Well, he only did for a brief time, but when he was ready to retire he was ready. You know it was time to hang up the gun belt. He was done. You know he left the resident post after 11 years and went to air operations. We moved to Redding.

Chuck: Oh, Redding is another cold town, except it is a beautiful area.

Christa: It is.

Chuck: So, you were born and raised out in the woods there up to about 11 roughly. .

Christa: I was, yes, and so when we moved to Redding he was flying in the helicopters. He was the observer in the helicopter, and he absolutely loved that. You know, we were in Shasta County. I mean you’re flying over Lake Shasta, and Mount Shasta, beautiful, but you know, he had an unfortunate experience in 1980 and the helicopter went down in the Trinity Alps, and you know, it was, there was a close call. We didn’t know their condition for quite some time, you know, it was different back then now you have all of these…

Chuck: GPS and everything, yeah.

Christa: Well, and you have these Chaplaincy services that come in and be with the family and what not, we’ve got a phone call from dispatch I mean that the helicopter went down, we don’t know anything. So, you know, after a scary four hours of waiting to learn if my dad was okay, after that my mom kind of said I think we’re done with the Air Ops I think you need to choose another…

Chuck: Oh, okay, all right.

Christa: She was, you know, pretty adamant that we are not going do this again, so he promoted to Sergeant and was assigned to Sacramento to the academy as an Accident Investigation Instructor.

Chuck: Oh, that’s cool. I graduated from Sacramento Academy, it’s a great academy.

Christa: It’s an amazing academy.

Chuck: Yeah, it’s one of the best in the world, yes.

Christa: Really that’s where I grew up.

Chuck: More in Sacramento.

Christa: At the academy. You know, I used to love to go to work with my dad on the weekends, and just hang around and just see the cadets, it was just such an amazing place, I call it my second home because I have such fond memories every time I go there.

Paul: Well, Chuck when did you graduate?

Chuck: I went to 09 Academy in ’87.

Paul: Well, but there was at, about the same time?

Chuck: Oh, I wonder yeah.

Christa: I think he would in ‘87 he was in the Commissioner’s Office so he was no longer at the academy, but he, he’s back in time.

Paul: Because he would have remembered Chuck.

Christa: Yeah, probably.

Chuck: Well, unfortunately it does my reputation does precede me, I want to say. I had an unfortunate incident of during the motor cycle training, driving to the sand pit and I’d passed everything with flying colors. When I got to the sand pit, the handle bars locked, it stopped moving, I didn’t stop moving and that’s what happens…Mr. Happy hit the handle bars and I had a little problem for long. It was a little painful for a couple of weeks and then turned into a six-month thing, so, but a great academy and the instructors were very professional what was really cool is, if, by the way he told me you dad was a motor on top of this, I’d say, oh my god, I’d have to worship the guy…

Christa: No he was in not a motor. He would have loved to have been a motor…he talked about it.

Chuck: That would have been the ultimate, you know, because they’re the prima donnas we get it right. So, you get your, first day at the academy we’re all in our little jumpsuits we had to wear for training on the motor cycle ride and a group was, they say you guys you live there for the academy. We walked in the cafeteria and there’s all these cadets walking around and also this giant hole opens up in the line and everybody’s snaps to attention and says, “Buy your leave sir, buy your leave sir, buy your leave sir” what, the he’ll are you talking about, buy my leave, what? And they all line up against the wall, and let us go right to the front line and the motors could do anything they wanted at the academy people had to get out your way, you could take their parking space. It was really, it was really kind of cool. The only time I was ever actually respected as a police officer, right. I was in Motor Academy, but it’s a very professional organization and I could see we have a lot of fun there, so it’s a neat place.

Christa: It’s really a neat place, you know, I was, had the amazing privilege of, you know, learning to drive my dad, when I was 16. You know he had a female EVOC instructor, who he thought, she would be better suited to teach me to drive than he would, so you know, I had, I had the privilege…

Paul: That’s good…

Chuck: You got to, you got to EVOC? That is so cool.

Christa: Well, the Emergency Vehicle Operations Course is an amazing high-speed track as well as the skip pan, which I think everyone that goes through drivers training should have to do this skip pan…

Paul: Yeah, you’re right. You’re right.

Chuck: I’ve done EVOC twice it’s amazing.

Christa: So, it was really an awesome experience, but after my dad left the academy, he was assigned to the Commissioner’s office and did some time in there and…

Chuck: This is CHP Commissioner?

Christa: This CHP Commissioner and the Commissioner is appointed by the Governor and…

Chuck: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Christa: Yes. Yes, so he was with the Commissioner’s office for, for quite some time and then moved on into the Governor’s office and he served under both Deukmejian and Wilson and worked their details and that was where something really incredible happened, Deukmejian and President Reagan were very good friends and one of the opportunities that Reagan had was to go to Japan to throw out the first ball in the World Series. People don’t know this, but President Reagan didn’t take empty planes, when he went overseas. He took family members of military personnel.

Chuck: Oh, that’s really cool.

Christa: Yeah and my brother…

Chuck: Just kind of randomly said, “Hey, come along and get on a ride. ”

Christa: Well, they, they often don’t get to see their families very often, you know, it was just something that he liked to do, so he invited us to come along at the request of Governor Deukmejian. My brother was stationed in Misawa Air Force Base in Japan and so we had the opportunity to travel with the Reagan’s.

Chuck: On Air Force One?

Christa: Yeah, ten days. Ten days we, there was Air Force One and then the Japanese government chartered a 747

Chuck: Air Force one and a half cover…okay.

Christa: Yeah, so there was a split off…

Chuck: Oh, because there’s, so many people to yeah, travel, yeah.

Christa: So, we went, in the picture that was just shown that’s my dad on board the aircraft with President Reagan, you know he, we were not separated. He came around and interacted with us and…

Chuck: How nice.

Christa: It was incredible.

Paul: I wonder if anybody else has ever done that.

Chuck: You…met President Reagan?

Paul: That’s number 10, he came and visit Thatcher.

Chuck: Hold on a second. It’s a, it’s a Security Guy Radio exclusive. You met him as a Bobby at Maggie Thatcher’s house Number 10, Downing Street. Then twenty-five years later you’re meeting him as the President of the United States…

Paul: I’ll tell you, I tell you another story. When I was working for Thatcher, I actually met Murdoch.

Chuck: Then you went to work for him?

Paul: Then I went to work for him. I made it was only, you know, fleeting, but…

Chuck: …some connection there. You’re a British spy. Almost sure, you are a British Spy, no doubt about it.

Paul: Yeah…small world.

Christa: See that’s world stuff.

Chuck: So, you get to go to Japan, you got to, you know, hang out people in tour and…

Christa: We did.

Chuck: Talk to Reagan’s, how nice is that?

Christa: You know, he gifted all of us with jackets with the presidential seal, which was really incredible. I was a teenager at the time so I didn’t quite grasp the magnitude.

Chuck: So, this was you? I don’t want to go — be in a business plane.

Paul: Who the hell is Reagan?

Chuck: Who is Reagan? I want to go home.

Christa: I’m tired. It was a long flight.

Paul: That’s great. I wonder if any, President’s have done that I guess not…

Christa: Not to my knowledge. Not to my knowledge.

Chuck: This is great isn’t it?

Christa: Well, my dad my dad had a pretty good relationship with Secret Service, you know…

Chuck: Now you have a Secret service story I think to tell us.

Christa: The Secret Service would often train at the CHP Academy. They would come into town and they would do trainings together…

Chuck: Oh I didn’t know that…

Christa: Yeah and so my dad, you know, always the gracious host would invite the Secret Service agents to our house to have dinner and so they would come over and pizza and beer and they’d start telling stories and so I loved to sit by and listen to these stories. I mean, they were telling really good stories. Some I could never share…

Chuck: Tell us off camera, I got to hear it.

Christa: But, so I, I had mentioned that I had a date that night, I was getting ready to go out on a date, but I was enjoying waiting for my date, sitting there listening to these stories and one of the guys says, you know, “Hey, I thought you were going on a date” and I, you know, I kind of said, “Well, yeah, but he is late” and they were like “Oh, ho what.” So, when the doorbell finally rang these six or so Secret Service agents said, we’ll get the door. [Laughing]

Chuck: Oh, no. Oh, no.

Christa: So, my dad’s just grinning ear to ear, you know, and just, he’s probably thinking the same thing I’m “What the heck is going to happen out there? ” After a few minutes, I didn’t see my date, so I decided to go and check on him and see what was going on and I walked out the front door and they have the poor guy prone out on the driveway.

Chuck: What. Oh, no.

Christa: They have the doors of his car open and they’re going through everything in the car and their matching serial numbers they’re it was…

Chuck: Oh, crazy Secret Service guys with a sense of humor.

Christa: I know, I know.

Chuck: What was that, was this a just a joke or they just, what were they doing?

Christa: Oh, they were messing with him.

Chuck: That’s a big messing.

Christa: For being late. So, we finally… They let him go and his, he was bad. He didn’t open my door for me and that was the whole other issue, so we, when we get in the car, they knock on the window and are saying, you know, “and you better not bring her home late” so I think we were gone maybe 20 minutes. We like went to have ice cream or something and come back. I mean, it was definitely not the date that we had planned, but after that he was like, “Yeah”. He never said a word to me, he didn’t ask me any questions or anything, came home, dropped me off and left and I never heard from him again and I…

Chuck: I wonder why?

Christa: I’m, I’m thinking this guy is probably still asking himself “Who the heck was she that she has Secret Service.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Chuck: We should be listening. We should look him up on Facebook and try, Jarvis we should look up on Facebook and try to get him and log him that will be kind of funny. That’s, that’s pretty wild.

Christa: It was pretty funny.

Chuck: Well, but did you like this guy? I’m glad you have sense of humor, if I did that to my daughter that would be the end of me. I would, just be, she’d never talked to me again.

Christa: Well, I, I didn’t necessarily like him after he was so late picking me up. You know…

Chuck: Oh, well, okay. Oh okay. I’ll side with you on that one…

Christa: I like people to be on time and to be true to their word and…

Chuck: I’ll bet you he’s never late for his next date after that.

Christa: Well…

Paul: Probably never had another time.

Chuck: Yeah right. He’s, he’s probably still single.

Christa: He’s probably spending in a corner somewhere still trying to figure it out.

Chuck: Right, so what did, what you dad do after he left to Commissioner’s office, he retired from there?

Christa: You know when, he was getting close to retirement, he really wanted to go back to his really true love, and that was Air ops, so…

Chuck: Even after mom said no?

Christa: Even after mom said no, but he went back as a Sergeant and so he was not actively in the air, he was the commanding of the, of the unit there, so he wanted to retire doing what he loved.

Chuck: Well, that’s nice.

Christa: So, he went back to Air ops and he retired in 1996 and you know, it was a great career. My daughter likes to say that, her grandpa is a retired CHP officer.

Chuck: Not retired and tired.

Christa: She and I think she’s right, you know, after the long career like that, he really, he put in his time, so…

Chuck: Has he gone back into anything with helicopters now, in retirement?

Christa: No, not with helicopters.

Chuck: He never got his license or privately flew?

Christa: No.

Chuck: Oh, interesting.

Christa: Yeah, but, you know, helicopters was, that was really kind of his thing. You know, interesting in that, you know, none of us, kids went into Law Enforcement, but you know…

Chuck: Now, that’s interesting. Were you interested initially or?

Christa: Absolutely, I would, I wanted to fly helicopters. That was my dream, you know, in the book I talk a lot about my, how I develop this crazy passion for helicopters, but I’m legally blind, so I couldn’t pass the physical, so…

Chuck: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that all right.

Christa: You know, that’s okay, you know. It’s something you learn to live with, right.

Chuck: Yeah, that’s right.

Christa: So, I didn’t, I didn’t get into Law Enforcement, but interestingly enough, you know, my daughter with her foundation and her connection with Law Enforcement, she was awarded the Commissioner’s Medal of Distinction, which…

Chuck: The CHP Commissioner’s?

Christa: Yes. This is the, a high honor paid by CHP and this was the fifth one in the history of the California Highway Patrol to be awarded.

Chuck: Ever since the beginning?

Christa: Ever Since 1929.

Chuck: That’s impressive.

Christa: it was in recognition of her foundation in her support of Law Enforcement, so…

Chuck: Fabulous. It’s a civilian award from, yeah.

Christa: It’s a Civilian Award.

Chuck: Five of them.

Christa: It’s just kind of really a great way to kind of finalize, you know, the legacy that my dad created and the just the true honor and respect for public service, and it’s carried on through the generations, so….

Chuck: Now you sound very grateful to be the, the child of a police officer and a police family.

Christa: I am.

Chuck: Tell us why do you think that way?

Christa: Because I know the sacrifice that our Law Enforcement make, you know. I’ve seen what my father has gone through. You know, the hard hours, dealing with death, dealing with fear. These guys really, they put it all out there.

Chuck: The families participate in that, right.

Christa: Absolutely.

Chuck: As a family you are getting residual blow off from that.

Christa: Absolutely.

Chuck: You are getting a bad day at the office, you’re getting quiet silence, because it’s difficult to talk about, right. That’s very important to have that perspective of things.

Christa: It is and it’s important to have for our Law Enforcement officers to have that supportive family, to have that support system at home.

Chuck: Did you think you had fewer friends than you would have liked since dad was arresting everybody in the town eventually.

Christa: No, I had the greatest friends ever, because…

Chuck: Good, all right.

Christa: They were Law Enforcement officers.

Chuck: Oh, well, okay. Okay there is another thing, we only have a couple of minutes, but I have a lot of friends and I have a lot real friends, not just Facebook friends, but good friends. You know a lot of them are Law Enforcement not all and that’s a difficult transition for police officers to make, they have friends outside of Law Enforcement.

Christa: Right.

Chuck: Would you agree Paul?

Paul: No way.

Chuck: It’s not always easy, you know, the most intend to stay within Law Enforcement.

Paul: You know, coming out where I was in London, it was a little bit different because it was so mixed. You were police in where he was born.

Christa: Right.

Chuck: That’s true.

Paul: So, it was a little bit different.

Chuck: So, do you feel as the child of a police officer that you are, you may have lost some friends because they weren’t in the police community, because they want to socialize with you or something?

Christa: Some of them I mean especially in the small town, because like I said, you know, their parent may have been cited or…

Paul: Arrested.

Christa: Arrested by my dad, you know, last night and so they aren’t going to be nice to me at school the next day, so yeah, you know, those kinds of situations happen.

Chuck: It’s very hard to describe to people that aren’t in it, but it’s kind of a unique extended family.

Christa: It is.

Paul:

Chuck: I mean I can’t think of any of my police officer friends that if they needed something for their kids I would be there just as if there were my kids.

Christa: Absolutely.

Paul: Well again I think you know once a cop always a cop.

Christa: Amen, yeah.

Chuck: Mr. Jarvis am I getting the finger? Mr. Jarvis give it us the finger, the one minute finger.

Chuck: Trinchera good heavens. I got to burn off my Italian Christa, thank you very much for your time.

Christa: Thank you.

Chuck: Very interesting, to read you guys check it up Blue Line Baby at bluelinebaby.com, right.

Christa: Bluelinebaby.com

Chuck: We get that, and I get that. Here we go. Get the shot there Jarvis, get there all right. You come on again and give us some updates and how your dad is doing by the way. Is he having fun at his retirement?

Christa: He is doing amazing. He is having lots of fun in retirement.

Chuck: What his first name?

Christa: Dale.

Chuck: Dale, you are stud dude. I really think you are awesome. Thanks for letting us to talk about your career as police officer. We’ll see you again next week on Security Guy Radio. Thanks.

AMAG’s policy engine, Symmetry CONNECT allows companies to operationalize their business by automating processes to meet audit and compliance issues. Symmetry GUEST visitor management helps better manage the different identities in a facility.

Also, joining us, Paul Bristow & Cherise Gutierrez. Cherise, our Cyber Gal gives us an update on the iPhone San Bernardino case — does the FBI & government really hold the key to 16 million phones now? She also discusses the trump hotel breeches.

Chuck Harold & Guests

Kurt Takahashi, SVP at AMAG.Com

Cherise GutierrezCyberThreatBeGone.com

Paul Bristow SecurityGuyRadio.com

Chuck HaroldThe Security Guy

Full text of radio show

Please forgive any typos, this podcast was transcribed by my typing pool comprised of volunteer stalkers.

Show Opening

Chuck Harold: There’s my voice okay. Welcome to operation … wait a minute, I got to say this right. Operationalized Version of Security Guy.Paul Bristow: Well it’s the actual words.Chuck: Well it’s like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.Paul: I can’t say that. Welcome to the show!Chuck: Welcome back Mr. Bristow.Paul: Yes, thanks.Chuck: Wondering .. what you’re up to this weekend?Paul: [unknown] because it was St. George’s DayChuck: Oh, good for you.Paul: YesChuck: Well I had quite a trying weekend. There happens to be a rabbit who in my house. Did I tell you that story?Paul: You did.Chuck: Yes.Paul: And I told you how to get rid of it?Chuck: I have some plans.Paul: Whether electrical.Chuck: I’m surprised that the police did not shoot the rabbit when they came to my house because the rabbit chewed my panic alarm button and set off alarms. Silent alarm, and I was taken down by the Burbank Police Department at gunpoint wondering what I was doing in the house. And then they had to come in to the house and ask my daughter what she was doing, “Are you okay ma’am? Do you know this man?” “Unfortunately he is my dad” she says. That was nice thing to say…Paul: So why would a Security Guy Radio have an alarm cord in a place where it could be chewed by a rabbit?Chuck: No the question is why is the rabbit in a place that’s chewing my cord? Why is the rabbit living in the bedroom? It’s a rabbit… It’s very annoying.Paul: I like rabbit stew, actually.Chuck: It’s incredibly destructive. It’s unbelievable. But right now we want to see what’s going on with Cherise? Welcome Cherise, Cybergirl, what’s going on?Cherise Gutierrez: Hi! Thanks for having me back.Chuck: Are you dry?Cherise: Yes.Chuck: 16 inches of rain. Oh my gosh.Cherise: Yes and you know we live in the Heights and it’s called the Heights for a reason because they build our homes up so high because we do live in a flooding range but thankfully we didn’t suffer any of the flooding. It was more North of Houston that got it unfortunately.Chuck: Well I’m glad you’re safe, I heard sixteen inches where people could have been killed flooding away, it’s crazy.Cherise: Horses, yeah, it’s traumatic down here when it rains.

San Bernardino iPhone Case

Chuck: What’s the latest in the cyberworld? I know you have another good story to piss me off.Cherise: Absolutely, Yes, so I don’t to keep rehashing old topics but this is a pretty big one. Wanting to keep on tab with the San Bernardino iPhone case.Chuck: OH, Yes!Cherise: Feds recently disclosed that they actually paid an independent consultant to hack the phone and they were successful. But, what’s making more of the news rounds is not so much that they finally cracked it because we knew that was just a matter of time but it’s the amount that they paid to have it cracked. Can you guess?Chuck: I think it was more than the FBI Director can make before he retires?Paul: They did say how much it was but I can’t remember.Cherise: Exactly, 1.3 million dollars.Chuck: That seems cheap to me. Doesn’t it?Paul: It does . . . I don’t know.Cherise: Actually, it’s the highest bounty that has ever been paid for a cyber hack. Can you believe that?Chuck: Well that kind of sounds like ransomware to me..Paul: It’s reverse ransomwareChuck: Yeah, that’s right.Cherise: You know there’s definitely going to be some good and some bad that come out of this, you know. For me I think the unfortunate part is now the FBI holds the key to unlocking the iPhone version 5c on iOS9 for about sixteen million devices in use.Chuck: Do you believe it? I’m skeptical. I’m almost thinking it’s a bluff to get Apple off the butt to do something in there. I don’t know, what do you think?Paul: Well you know what I can’t believe. Feds didn’t have somebody to do this themselves and it doesn’t make sense right?Chuck: Of course it makes sense. It’s the FBI. The Federal Bureau of Incompetence’s. Sorry fellas but you know it’s true if you work there.Paul: Authority is famous but incompetent.Chuck: Famous and incompetent that could be too.Paul: The photo was famous but incompetentChuck: Oh, famous from incompetent that can we . . .Paul: That was security guy….Chuck: They really think they cracked it. I mean… let’s talk about that briefly. There are things that are encrypted.Cherise: They are claiming that they cracked and they didn’t do any kind of integrity damage to the data.Chuck: Now cracking meaning they broke the encryption code or somebody found the key and unlock it. Which one do you think it was?Cherise: It’s was probably the combination of both. They have to create and crack the key and then use those techniques on to the code. And so you know in terms of how they did it I believe details will come out. It could only stay a secret for so long.Chuck: Right.Paul: For sure is, I’m going to get back to… you mean you must notice stuff. Surely the Feds have got a whole team that work on that. So out of the business, right?Cherise: They do, but in terms of having the in-house expertise for such a real low level understanding of encryption, the operating system. It takes a multi-talented individual to have these skills to not only come up with the hack and decrypt it but to safely do it and there are not that many believe it or not skilled resources out there with those capabilities.Chuck: Oh they probably just went to the Federal Penitentiary and pulled out one of those guys.Paul: I bet they did ask the British Secret Service or those somebody.Chuck: They probably did not.Cherise: Why not? So you know are we interested to see where this goes on from here. Now knowing that the government has access to be able to decrypt over sixty million devices essentially. So we’ll see how this plays out in terms of our privacy and protection.Paul: Well I know when they look at mine anytime. It’s so boring.Chuck: Well mine is not exactly boring maybe they should look at mine butPaul: Well I know, I know what you’ve been up to.

Trump Hotels

Cherise: In other unrelated cyber news. Let’s talk about one of our Presidential Candidate hopefuls. One of his assets is in the spotlight and it’s Trump Hotels. Apparently they have been breached for the second time this year. It’s noted that it’s a credit card breach on their POS System that’s Point of Sales that do all the transactions where the hotel.Chuck: That’s not good.Cherise: Yeah, not good. A researcher has disclosed this week that they bound out a pattern of fraud on multiple credit cards and the one thing in common was they were originating from the Trump Hotel Chain.Chuck: Originally from there? How interesting.Paul: They should have been using Hilary’s server. They’ve been thinking about, right?Chuck: He’s not just the fund his campaign because he always spend like six grand in New YorkCherise: And you know they start asking him for comments. And you know he starts of course redirecting the comments and making it about the US and how Cyber Security is obsolete here instead of focusing on the issue at hand because hotel chains.Chuck: It seems to me that the Trump Campaign and many others should operationalize their technology. Can you say it?Paul: No.Cherise: Operationalize.

Kurt Takahashi, Senior VP of sales for AMAG

Chuck: There we go. And that’s why we just happen to have someone in the studio as we always do to help us with that challenge and that’s Mr. Kurt Takahashi, Senior VP of sales for AMAG. Welcome to the show.Kurt Takahashi: Thank you. Appreciate you having me.Chuck: Now I’m so happy to have AMAG on here. Big operation part of G4S gives us your introduction on what AMAG does and just a broad stroke on it.Kurt:AMAG has traditionally been known as an access control company for about forty plus years we’ve been in the access control market. The last several years we’ve really changed the way that we do things and we’re really evolving our technology to do a lot of more things just access control.Chuck: And such as?Kurt: So some of the interesting things that were doing is we look at the client needs around lot of their risks and compliance and cost issues is we find that there are a lot of challenges with once your install an access control system or a video system or any type of thing.
The biggest challenge that we find is once it’s installed, nobody’s really there to help them figure out what to do with it. For what reasons do they need it. How do they help operationalize what they do every day and so some of the things that we’re doing that’s very unique in the market is that we’re taking that next leap.
Alright, and that’s really what our big shift is in the last couple of years is introducing this concept to the market that we have this very powerful policy engine that sits behind the curtain of our technology. And we’ve also taken another step towards more of the managing that different types of identities in the facilities like a visitor, a contractor or an employee, right? We utilize our policy engine to help automate some of those manual processes that sit behind the curtain. Because most people with their security they tend to just put more people at it.
We talked earlier that a lot of companies are starting to see more requirements around audit, a lot more compliance. As we see companies expanding multi-nationally across the globe and consolidation, we see a lot more requirements that are being pushed down like in the utility market. We see a lot of compliance requirements around Merck or in the petrochem or financial. They are all related and in the cyber side you’re starting to see a lot more requirements from PCI background.
Things of how you store credit card data and things like that. A lot of times it focuses on who gets to go where, why they get to go there, reasons that they go there and lot of companies have to do this manually. You’ll be amazed that when you really start talking to people about what they do every day? How do you get access? How do you request it? How do you audit? How do you re-certify those things? All things that are required for this compliance requirement are all done manually.
So that’s where the big things we’re doing differently and AMAG is we’re introducing some new applications that extend the value of AMAG’s Access Control Platform. We really take to the next step to help automate all those manual processes that exist. All the emails, fax forms, the manual forms, all the reports and the manual transitions to get all these done, we’re automating a lot of that so that it totally simplifies how you do things. But more importantly what it does is that it helps ensure that all those policies are met. Primarily because we’re taking a lot of that manual intervention out of the way.
So when the auditors come in and internal audits are being performed, were able to prove how you do things because it’s all happening in a single location. Trying to consolidate all of those different features into a single user interface so that it makes it simple for the security team, it makes it simple for the end user, it satisfies all the different unique needs of all the different lines of business. So every body’s policies and requirements seem to be changing on a daily basis. So security teams like yourself Paul are very difficult for you to maintain all that. It’s hard to keep everybody happy and stay in compliance.
So when you start having people get access that they don’t belong into right? It becomes very risky especially if you’re into utility, right? We have somebody standing on the substation or your financial institution and somebody’s getting in to your data center or your vault. Or you’re a healthcare organization and you have a heap of requirements that you have to deal with.
When you’re really start looking at it day to day, it’s very difficult for you to maintain all of that because it takes more and more people, it takes more email, it takes more reports, and it’s very difficult for a company to do that. So some of the key things that we are doing is we’re introducing some very interesting extension offers or symmetry access control platform that allow people to do all of that in very simple way.Paul: Do you have a special team that goes in and does act. Because when we were at Fox and we have a pretty good access control system but we would sit for hours just trying to work it outChuck: The permissions, the rules.Paul: What are we going to do? Do you have a special team that understands peoples business? Because that’s part of… you’ve got to understand the business, right? Before you can go. I mean there’s a huge value at it. I haven’t heard that from other access control companies, nobody talks about that. They put the system in and they walk away. You know and it’s like what should we shall I do with it?Kurt: That’s exactly what we are trying to do. We have a team of people that go in and we perform what we call like a workshop. Now this is where we really start asking some of those deeper questions about how do you do it today? What do you today? Let’s talk about your technical infrastructure then let’s talk about the different users and what they have to do every day. The different policies and what are your audits and we take it down to that very granular level to say what do you do today? When Chuck needs to act request access from you? What does he have to do? How does it actually…Paul: I wouldn’t give access at all anyway.Kurt: He might be on that watch list. So we really peel it on your back and we try to detail it all out and we can create that as a state the future state then we can apply what we have from our technology base and we can say this is how we can automate it. And it’s not a lot of customization, it’s just a very simplistic way of approaching it but AMAG is the first company in the market to add this type of feature to their access control platform because traditionally you have to go buy another third party application in order to bolt on to your solution.Paul: What I thought we got to do?Chuck: There’s a lot of manual program. In other words I get to sit there and flip switches to decide what areas you could go into and how. And you did get there right on time. It was problematic. So this really goes back to the word that I can’t pronounce. It is operationalizing the technology to make it function.
So here is the challenge I always on tell me if you think I’m right or wrong this. So I put a system in and we have 200% turnover on the guard force so I can track them within my building. So the guy I taught to how to use the system and spent a bunch of training on, he’s gone now. And now I got to come back and say, “Okay, let’s train the next guy.” In the old days at the north because of that turnover had to be… the new guard had to be retrained. So you’re optimizing this by using some automatic features taking people out of the system based on rules and things like, is that a good description?Kurt: Yeah, so we take it from the personnel level, right? So, how you request it? How you approve it, right? How do you audit? It’s all automated on a single user interface, a single platform. The policy engine on the back side of things is what does that if then statement. If this happens to this send an email to this person and then they can approve it and automatically push that down into the access control system or take it out.
On the flip side what we’re also doing is when you take your video surveillance feed and pull that into the access control system that’s also another compelling piece because from a training perspective the guard has to know, what do I do when something happens? An event happens that you see in video it triggers something that has to happen in the access control system and then that guard or that operator then has to figure out, okay what am I suppose to do today? How am I suppose to handle this instance? What am I suppose to do next? So again the policy engine that sits behind the curtain allows to then say, when this happens? Do this.
Check the video. Okay it’s good make a comment. Next do this then email this, then do this. So in ensuring that all those steps are met and that’s what we call our workflow alright. Our workflow engine that sits within our access control platform that helps. Again, take the video feeds and help you decide what to do. That way from a training perspective it’s very automated. You don’t have to you know hopefully that person remembers to make the right decision. We help them guide them through those right decisions and then that becomes completely automated in the back-end.Chuck: So it’s presenting commands to the guards to do this and do that, that kind of thing.Kurt: And again historically, you have to go buy another third party piece of software overlay that onto your system and that what’s help you. The nice thing about Symmetry is this all this is built-in to the product.Chuck: How do you handle temporary visitors? Is this a challenge I just assume it was and found a great product out there that all they do is to visit the management. It plug-ins to other systems and I asked the guy, I don’t get it. I’m glad you exist. But why don’t the big access control companies have it? They focus on who’s cleared and not focus on temporary people because it’s harder to get them in and out of your database. How do you guys handle that at AMAG?Kurt: So again, we look at the different types of identities. We look at the visitor, we look at the contractor, we look at the employee. So from a visitor perspective a lot of challenge is that visitors brand management systems have is that it’s participation. I’ve talked to a lot of different end users every day and they say, Oh we have a visitor management system and we have a registration form that we do on our portal. You just go then it’s really simple and then you go in there. When you dig deeper you find out that that’s the biggest problem is nobody goes in and does it. So all your visitors just show up to the lobby every day because people are just too lazy to take that next step.Paul: Oh and they manually be cleared in real time.Kurt: What we have within our application. We have a visitor management portal and what we do is we made it that much easier. So most people schedule their meetings in Outlook or Google Calendar right so what we’ll do is everybody that you invite to that meeting we will immediately take every invite and we’ll automatically preregister them into the visitor management system but we’ll go again through the policy checks and we’ll say, “hey, are they cleared? Did they sign their NDA? Do we have to notify them of an NDA?” Things like that and then we’ll automatically then send you an email saying, “Paul and Chuck, we look forward to you coming to our facility on Monday. Just park here when you come. Here’s your confirmation number.
Here’s your barcode or you know bring your license.” And then when you come in the whole experience is seamless. And so what we’ve done is we’ve taken that one piece out of the equation of participation so most people again always schedule a meeting in Outlook or Google and then we’ll consume it automatically to make it pretty simple.Chuck: Even if the guy doesn’t show up, he’s not coming to the place. But he’s got a pass and anyways he does show up so then we don’t have to think about it really.Kurt: So he shows up, here’s my confirmation code, here’s my barcode, scan them in and it says, oh here’s Chuck. Where’s your ID? Okay, sign here and you’re in.Chuck: So talk about the rules. So you mentioned NDA Non Disclosure Agreement. And you can actually put something through that invite through Outlook. So I’m, you’re going to send me a pass Paul and you’re going to invite me and I’m going to receive… if it’s the rule or the policy for the company I’m going to receive a Non Disclosure Agreement. And I’m going to electronically sign and say, okay I agree. That’s fabulous!Kurt: You’ll either acknowledge it or when you come to check-in.Chuck: Or say, piss off – I’m not going to sign that.Kurt: Or you’ll sign it on a tablet right when we get there and then we’ll print your badge. But the nice thing is that you’ll be surprised at how many compliance requirements are around at how you manage visitors.Chuck: Give us some other ideas on compliance issues for that kind of stuff.Kurt: Yeah, so we’ve talked a lot of aerospace. If you have a lot of foreign nationals that come visit your facilities, a lot of times you have to acknowledge that. You have to deal with the… you have to manage that in a different ways.Chuck: Because it’s a government reporting requirement.Kurt: The International Trade Compliance requires you to manage your visitors a little differently. And so if you’re a Petrochem type facility you have to have a special type of safety training. So you got to take a safety video when you get there. Those are auditable things. Depending upon where you’re going everybody has a different compliance requirement that’s why the tool become so important because it’s got to be flexible. It’s got to deal with all these different things but the premise is still the same. You invite somebody, you check, make sure they pass and when they get in you have to acknowledge something or do something and we automate the whole process.Chuck: We should add some copyright disclosures for Fox… You have to look at that. Right?Chuck: This also makes me extremely nervous. So Kurt what was everybody doing fifteen years ago and we didn’t have this? Pencil and a piece of paper and guards that are just, “you look good to me pal, come on in.” “But I’m a foreign national and I want to steal your stuff.” “That’s okay, come on in anyway.” I mean, I don’t know how we do it, this is really, I’m surprised, I’m happy you have this product, I’m surprised it haven’t been around longer. Right?Kurt: Yeah, absolutely.Chuck: How long has this been around by the way?Kurt: So it’s been around for a couple of years and we actually re-launched it at Azis this past year. Because we rewrote it, we kind of give it a new look and feel. Made it a lot more user friendly. And so we just re-launched it and we’ve got great attention to it.Paul: How do you check the ID’s to make sure that person is, the person who says he is now. Is that presented to a person or is that or we got some way of…Chuck: Oh yeah they just swipe them. The magnetic strip.Kurt: You can use a passport scanner, you could use a driver’s license scanner. You can do that verification, validation, face to face things like that. We also partner with some unique technologies out there that do like facial identity and things like that that validate it that way too. And then we just consume that information into our own base technology so it works well both ways.Chuck: I mean Cherise are you still with us, underwater, are you still there?Cherise: Hi, I’m still here.

Stories of Access Control Attacks – Policies

Chuck: If you have any stories about you know hacking access control systems. Is that anything that’s attacking lately because it seems to me if you want to get in you’d hack and put your own pass and then your inside and nobody know your there.Cherise: Yes, not necessary hacking the access control but they’re definitely always stories about breaches done by an insider, a malicious insider. Most recently one of law firms in Dallas sentenced a former employee to nine years in prison and over a million dollars in fees and payback costs because he was a disgruntled employee who was actually the IT Engineer.
So he knew his way around the network, took controls it had and when he basically the environment, the network that was unauthorized at the time because he was already let go of the company. He caused a lot of disruption, he turned off services, he deleted a bunch of files, he disabled lot of accounts, he didn’t specify which system he used and broke into but I’ve got to imagine an access control system was probably one of them.
He was caught actually by the company that he worked for is a pretty big company called Locky Lord here in Dallas. And he got caught and now he’s being sentenced to nine years in prison. So this stuff does happen where they do access at the place, mostly from an insider perspective.Chuck: So Kurt I’m mostly worried about this because this is where we get hit the most is from inside. I’m not worried about a terrorist getting a pass and come into the building. May happen someday but really before it happens your IT department going to get you. How does AMAG handle internal security? Talked about two ways, three way authentications or biometrics you can put on top of this so you really want to make sure that somebody is not a single source or single point of failure, right? Like the one IT guy is the only guy that can work the system and if he’s out everything fails. How does AMAG handle that?Kurt: I think there are a lot of different layers of authentication from an identity record, right? But again it goes down to one of the key things that you said was. This person was no longer an employee of the company and came back. A lot of times what you see with those types of identity is that they get terminated but there’s a step that gets missed. Their access doesn’t get taken out.
There is a recent case that was on the news at Logan Airport where… I don’t know if you remember this but there is a gentleman that got terminated from one of the contractors and he ended up getting on the airplane and started getting pictures and post a bunch of them on Facebook. The issue usually comes in somebody didn’t take them out of the system. Right again, it’s a manual process.Paul: And it should be automatic.Kurt: It should be automatic. It should be policy based.Paul: How could it be automatic? If he…Chuck: But if I fire you right now, in theory, I still need to manually go in and say, “Okay, he’s fired.” And I to take him out.Paul: Well no, if you take… if you are firing somebody you going to do a salary due. You get paying the check. So as soon as you press that button that produce that check.Chuck: Because you’re tied to the HRPaul: HR don’t want to be tied into it effect.Kurt: There’s two ways to do it right. As soon as your record changes in HR, should automatically take you out in the system. It could also if it’s an urgent termination you should be able to click one button and take them out on all of your systems. So again it’s based on how that identity changes within the environment.
Then the other thing too is one of the things that were starting to look at as well is we know where you’re supposed to go. So a lot of times what you start seeing is abnormal behavior. What happens when I start coming in at 2 in the morning. That should be a red flag. What happens when I start trying to access restricted areas that I’m not supposed to have access to? These are all red flags that we should be looking at. So because we have all this data, it doesn’t mean we’re not really using it that well. That’s the thing that were looking out for the future is how do we make sure that we’re looking at all the data all the time because it’s all there.Paul: Why don’t? Because we used to actually use a lot of data.Chuck: Remember our famous case. So there’s your famous case Kurt. We had the Fox Network Center live broadcasts facility we’re very serious about people coming and going because it’s on the air, Fox Sports and lots of stuff and so we had a, you know fought with checkpoint or some kind of system. We either manually configure peoples ID’s but one day we had a wallet theft and then over a course of three months we had about thirteen wallets stolen. And were scratch our head gone how is this guy getting on stealing all these wallets. Right cubicles, briefcases. So we took the data, we crunched it and we wrote some queries because this had to be done manually. All the marks with access.Paul: This was in the day, by the way.Chuck: This was in 99 right? And I said, “Okay, I got thirty thousand access, control records, coming and going. I have five thousand employees. Tell me which employee out of five thousand was here for all thirteen thefts? And what Paul and I would find was we’ll find twenty or thirty and we’ll narrow it down – it was just one guy. Only one guy that appeared in all these different time frames which were weekends, dayshifts all kind of stuff.
The next closest appearance of somebody showing up was seven of the thirteen times and it went down to one appearance and ten appearances. And then what we did… well that must be the guy, we put a wallet up and camera and sure enough here he comes. That was the guy we caught him, right? Very labor intensive, cost a lot of money to get a programmer in there and do a lot of stuffs.
Do the AMAG systems have some automatic maybe it’s not a great word but automated analytics? Listen I need, here’s five queries I need. I need everybody who came in late, I need everybody that came on a weekend and in the old days we used to call that a hall pass, remember? If you’re walking around the studio and you’re not supposed to be here on a Saturday. We say what are you doing here? Your ID’s not authorized right?Kurt: So I would really go as far as calling it analytics because I think sometimes analytics has some kind of widely used name. It really goes back to a fundamental change. We’re not focusing so much on the door and the card reader, the panel or the door. The focus on you, you’re the identity. So if you’re an employee, you’re a contractor, you’re a visitor. We want to try to consume as much information about who you are? What department you’re in? What building you go too? What trainings do you have? Where do you belong? All of those different actions its about you because instead of managing the door, we’re managing you.
So the more information we have about you, it’s easier to report on who you are? Where you’ve been? Why you’ve been there? Who’s approved it? So it makes reporting much simpler. So I wouldn’t go so much to say it’s analytics whereas it’s just smarter reporting because we’re trying to get more information about you by attributes whether its where you park? What building you’re in? What department you’re in? What training? All of those, the more things that we could tie to your identity record the easier it is to report on you.Paul: Do you find there are still very few companies that sort of work that way from a security department. I used to find it was sort of lack of imagination almost. Because you just did have that . . . You think outside the boxKurt: I think it’s just you don’t know what you don’t know. For the last, for years people solve this problem with people. And we come and talk to people about this solution, or this way of thinking. You really always get that aha moment. We do this manually, yeah we do this, you talk to the person that’s doing the audits and they just, they cringed because like, “Oh my gosh, I have these ten reports that I have to do and it takes me this many weeks to like compare all the data and it’s just a very time consuming process. So it’s really more about just not knowing what you don’t know and so not many people have taken this type of discussion now neither.Paul: A very good friend of ours Mike O’Brien always bring saying that if you can think of it with a computer or access control you can do it. But nobody thinks he’s got the imagination of thinking this stuff.Chuck: Computer Consultant guy’s a genius right so he would say look Chuck I can program what you tell me to program but you’re the guy who thinks about how to catch a bad guy Give two different topics together We had a guy that worked there at the network center. I set up a rule that said that every time that somebody goes to a door that they are not authorized to go to I want to get a report and we found a pattern with this. One guy kept going around hit and try to get into the networks center. Remember that guy?
And we pulled him aside saying what are you doing I didn’t tried to get in there. Oh, there’s a camera there’s the door I didn’t do it you knowKurt: Fishy that’s FishyChuck: Fortunately we were very tight on programmer doors. Once we made a mistake but these are the type of things I would call an analytic that would say can I by the way can I set up your amexes that would say there is a rule when people hit a door they are not supposed to go to more than twice a day I want to email this right.
So that’s how you solve the problem and then when people know that’s what happens they stopPaul: There you go .You use your imagination. Yes, think about itKurt: Yes, you got a think about it. What it isPaul: Which is the fun part of access controlKurt: It gives a fundamental change in thinking because most people think of access control as the door and the card
Now that’s–Paul: No that’s not what they think of access control don’t they fifteen twenty years ago.Chuck: Now my parents haven’t raised any dumb children but I am not the brightest bulb either right and I am thinking. We were thinking about this in 1996 it’s just logical to us but I think it takes somebody thinking about data and databases as a different way to analyze thing right. So we talked about this before the show and my question to you is. Is Security catching up? Because at one point I thought that it was exponentially behind technology.
The technology is there somebody develops it they built it and then they say go plug this into that company and make it work there you go. Well I don’t have a staff to work it and when I get back from I see watched this a couple of weeks ago. Boy there’s some good products out there and I go they will never work at fox I will never work at Disney because the staff isn’t going to be able to sustain that. Speak to me about what you think the trend of the industry is in our People getting this stuff or they saying I need to, do they force themselves at it. What’s the attitude?Kurt: I think they are forced to looking at options right because as we see a lot of companies growing through consolidation or global growth rate right. You just don’t have the large teams that you used to and everybody is forced to do more with less right so you’re forced to look at technology known. At Security Space, the concepts that I am talking about are not necessarily new to the industry.Chuck: RightKurt: And the problem is that the third party software applications that existed out there for last this say ten year or eight year are just have been too expensive so the barrier of entry becomes almost you know it’s very difficult for everybody to take advantage of it so that’s where AMAG and Symmetry is our brand has taken that on to make it more affordable for people solve this challenge so to answer your question, I definitely think technology is moving in the right direction.
It’s getting there it’s getting the users to really understand by compelling you know the benefits of it and why and once they do they’re all in the problem is just now how it’s gonna be affordable so I think you have that technology evolution curve that’s going on right now and it’s really climbing in the right direction and as it gets more affordable people are going to be able to take better advantage of it that’s one of the things we are trying to lead with.Chuck: So Cherise, at your buzz we have the cyber attacks and there’s always that curve of how to invest in protecting my network and what’s it going to cost me and you know what if China wants to look at my restaurant menu on my server I don’t care and worry about it but they don’t understand that getting to that server may get you into something more confidential right. So, what do you think people are going with this this price benefit analysis of people catch on your side of it that’s a lesson? If I do spend a hundred grand on this I’m going to save a billion on lawsuit. We talked about it several weeks ago. I am not sure people are still getting that part.

Affordability

Cherise: So you got a put them in different categories owes the haves and have-nots that’s what I like to call on and those that have are typically the enterprise companies with the largest budget they can afford you know six-figure installations of security controls and then you go down to the have nots which are your small to medium businesses that do not have the budget to satisfy the cost of these controls and so you know because of that demand you’re starting to see a lot of companies figure out a way to produce security controls out of affordable cost whether that’s a SAS model you know a service model that’s in the cloud or whether it’s a managed service but companies are starting to get a little bit smarter and try to figure out how to provide solutions at a lower cost point but right now it is very much a challenge in the industry.Chuck: Has AMAG ever thought of this idea? We take five companies to research with medium sized businesses. You got Me, Paul Fox & Disney here you got some cigars and we are all buddies and we know each other we have lunch we say you know what .What if we got AMAG and we all pitched in about one system because networks are networks but you know the network doesn’t restrict Fox and Disney as far as connectivity once you are connected right has anybody come to you and said, hey can we build a consortium of two or three smaller businesses to pay for this and we just bifurcate the servers and databases and say that’s Disney’s data and that’s Fox’s data and let’s make it work.Kurt: So a friend of mine that is up in the Bay Area they did that. But from our prospective we have our main product line is AMAG Symmetry access control right and then we also have a video platform which is called Symmetry complete view where our Symmetry Connect and Symmetry Guest which is Identity management application it is a hosted solution it’s a SaaS model. So we have made it so that you don’t pay this big cap-ex upfront for licenses and software we have made it to be a hosted solution that anybody could take advantage of it so its again it goes into you have a great technology but if nobody can afford it and nobody can use it then it doesn’t really do anybody good.
So we have really tried to get rid of this having to force people to get outside and go buy another third party software to tie into it. We try to make it as simple as possible for people to take what they have or look down from the road in an enabling perspective to say here’s our access control platform here’s our video platform lets integrate those two together for better total cost of ownership in the workflow the policy and then how do we take it to Gaston Connect to operationalize even bigger areas of risk where its audit was how people get places so those services from our Symmetry Guest and Symmetry Connect perspective are hosted solutions so makes it easy for people to participate in it.Paul: I think I was reading in the news the end users sees almost the Microsoft appearing product. Is that wrong?Kurt: Absolutely, you know if you look at our user interface it looks exactly like word. Right. So it’s for the users simplePaul: So how did you get it pass Microsoft?Kurt: We are Microsoft co partner.Paul: Right right.Kurt: So that’s the nice thing it’s not the bunch of custom docs up. Its off the shelf technology that we have brought into is not difficult to maintainChuck: G4s is in lot of government spaces with guarding. Correct?Kurt: Insight…Ahhmm I am not sure that they’re in government as much as they are in commercialChuck: Okay, I thought they–Kurt: They are in government but mostly clear facilities I believeChuck: Okay. So let’s take a giant g4s client we are finding your client saying, hey, listen I gotta a guard here want to put an AMAG connection to it. Does it work better? Is it better for client if they did that integration?Kurt: Yes. Absolutely because we get incredible insight from our partner company right sister company what we call G4S secure solutions right so they were the largest guarding companies in the world and I don’t think people realize how big they are and it affords us a lot of great insight from those users because they are the ones doing that day to day work. So getting the feedback from them and then really building our technology so that it helps make their job easier that that’s the best feedback we can get so we do a lot of partnering with our secure solutions company because you know they are in there every day fighting that battle and they are the ones that are seeing you know if we could have only done this differently or how do we do this or how do we bring more value that client that where AMAG from a technology perspective we could really leverage that together.
So I was kind of look at it from an AMAG perspective if I am just going out there to sell an access control system you know the values not as great but as I tie together my video platform I tie my guest in my Symmetry Connect as I build those all together the value proposition changes dramatically like just like on the G4S side right we have a consulting risk consulting firm we have a guarding team we have an integration team but we are very much separate in that regard but from a guarding perspective it brings a lot of value to bring technology to the operation.Paul: So the figure has always been a problem with gold companies. They never bring the technology wise solution together with the guards.Chuck: It’s a turnover problem. It’s another company it’s a computation alone. One way, you know getting the guard too.Paul: I think. Several companies tryKurt: So that’s the nice thing about you know our technology is we can be as small as a two reader system to a twenty thousand reader you know fifteen thousand camera system with hundreds and thousands of identities all managing through the whole process we can scale from super small to the largest in the world. You know we do business with bank of America we do with IBM we have some of the largest companies in the world and our system scales right we also have you know we could be doing this office right so it doesn’t really matter what we do with it once we install itChuck: We may have to do this. I have a new stalker. Yes I have a new stalker on LinkedIn Yes. It’s Litty from the Northern Iles. You know, what it is right the Northern Coast of Ireland EnglandPaul: Wait, what are you talking about? Northern England.Chuck: It’s called Northern Isle England – it’s a beach down in … it’s a linked-in stalker – we need some access control to watch.Paul: England or Scotland.Chuck: So here’s a question I have so we are Bank of America we used that as a client as an example and I’m assuming if somebody opens a door in Italy and who so ever was the in charge of the GSOC knows is that a good description?Kurt: Okay

Globalized Security Compliance

Chuck: How do you handle globalized compliance because may be you’re not allowed to use your access control system the way we use it in America in Italy may be there is privacy laws may be there’s all kinds of things right. So how do you handle it?Kurt: Depends on the client situation we could reach the servers to keep the data localized for their country so everybody’s different everybody has different sets of requirements and so that really boils down to architecture of how do you segregate the data how you keep it safe and secure and so its really not a problemChuck: Not a problem may be that’s because these big companies coming into. We plugged it in and turned it on for you and then the guy disappears and they have no sustainability or workability on itKurt: I think it’s around the approach of how you design the architecture right both from the physical architecture to the data architecture and that’s what our team does really wellChuck: Tell me about some different compliance challenges you guys have had and what you can plug in this. I mean to my head let’s talk about what I used to think about I thought about OSHO all the time right?Paul: HIPAA!Chuck: HIPAA! People don’t think about that even in a studding wine because you had this studio nursing officePaul: or moreChuck: Right! What’s another one?Kurt: SOXChuck: That’s a big oneKurt: So all of those have when you think about all those compliances except HIPAA, CFATS, SOX, PCI right all of those compliance have the same core element how did somebody get access? How did they request it? Who approved it? Did they get down in the system appropriately? How did you and how did you audit the report on it right in so what you find is that if I in a traditional model and you probably even saw this at Fox right if I needed a request access from you Paul I would just send you an email right then you had to find out who’s the owner of the area that you are trying to get access to.
Then you have to send an email with Chuck and then Chuck reviews based on whatever the policies are chucks got a review that and say okay is Kurt ok? Does he has the right training does he have this okay he’s good then he has to send you an email back and then you have to send it to somebody to go and manually type that into the access control system rightChuck: RightKurt: So that our Symmetry Connect does it says let’s get rid of all that because when I report on that I get all those emails I get all those reports I got to do all that What we will do is we give you a single place to request it’s a self service portal You going to say I need to go to Burbank well what building do you need to go I need to go to you know 4000 Boulevard street lets says right and it says okay I need to request this building this store click, click why do you need to go there I need to go there for these reasons the system because of the policy and you automatically know it needs to go to Chuck.
Chuck gets an email request. Quietly goes in looks at it use it in the portal ok good click as soon as he hits ok it goes right down to the access control system it removes all those emails all those steps it even ensures that the information gets into the access system so that when I have to go on auditing it lets say it is a SOX audit, I don’t have to pull all those reports. I just go into my page and say okay who has access to my area while these five people are good these five people are not – Yes Yes Yes no no no click ok automatically goes into the access system.
It removes all those steps in between automates the whole process but then more importantly when the auditors want to look at it you’re able to prove your levels of enforcement because you show how all this works within the self service portal and the audit takes care of it. Because it all there in the place I don’t have to pull reports and emails from all these different places to try to prove that I did it right it’s done right every time.Chuck: Now let’s talk about fraud and authentication there’s always somebody they think they are smarter than the system right Ah we had something similar at Fox you get an access number it went to your desk and you put in the past and had to come to me to prove itPaul: I always remember one of the issues and it’s some sort of interesting part of finger bowl access control that one day we found that we were in a circle of authorization and there wasn’t anybody actually at the top that was authorized to actually authorize the circle. Remember that? And I have always been with that one issue do we aid do we say we went way too many there’s nobody that’s actually authorizedChuck: Well Kurt says that the rule authorizes it but for full authentication and accountability Paul’s right somebody has to be the guy that says here it’s my policy it’s my rule so something does screw you can come back and do something with that. We have things like dongles and biometric things to log into these systems that the high administrative levels to approve these policies to get those things in there and to prevent somebody from you know being on the inside and hack in the systemsKurt: So that’s what we leverage you know the best tools so that a single sign-on is a perfect application for that we integrate into activate directories so the moment you log into your workstation right you are authenticated to the networks as you can get your emailChuck: Yeah but I don’t you don’t know that’s me that could be my secretary.Kurt: Right!Chuck: So you give your secretary your password because you want it toKurt: so that would be more on the cyber side right because you would have some type of authentication tool to get in that’s not something that we do we don’t go into that side because that’s logging into the actual workstation itselfChuck: So, Cherise, people would have to come on in work on thatKurt: That’s rightChuck: OkayKurt: We are behind the curtain of IT login they’re the experts we are not going to get into that space much but once you log into your workstation you have access to your applications you are authenticated into the system so now we are trusted person using the systemChuck: Here’s what you need. You need a do a little of this on this show it’s a little embarrassing sometimes a good idea sometimes a bad idea you guys could do this easily because every monitor has a camera so you could use facial recognition so to know that I am sitting at my terminal to know that I am putting in that pass and it takes a picture of my face and go yup that’s chuck in there typing at that end because at the sea level you have given your password to your secretary to your vice-president levels to go and do that shit I don’t want to bother with it and that’s not actual authentication right?Kurt: That’s trueChuck: that’s a free video by the wayKurt: I will make up a note of that one

Chuck: Cherise what would you recommend to do some authentication on top of that system what would you put in front of a biometrics of fingerprintCherise: You could do the biometrics you could do aahaa..Chuck: Some raster scans are pretty fast now out there I’m just worried that I mean that it’s only human error the buzz isPaul: So actually that brings up a question I will be doing is biometric taken off the wider everybody for ten fifteen years ago I mean everybody was talking about fingerprints and you know with the facial recognition I mean is it all people still use in a majority of people still use in what we callKurt: I think a lot of people still using the traditional method I think they are very interested in the biometrics and we start to see a lot of interests so you are at ISC West you see a lot of stuffPaul: It’s been in for years but you never get to see it operational.Kurt: It started to get closer and then we have a good partner of ours that does in motion identity work you just wall up to the door and you are the identity record so it looks like your face your gate everythingChuck: Oh I don’t know that partner we could just say it’s all rightKurt: FST is one. But there–Chuck: I think that’s rightKurt: So, there’s FST there are couple of them out there that we have integrated into our platform because we do think that it’s gonna move in that direction because people want to validate and verifyChuck: But that’s still on your end of it that’s a terminal ending point for your system we plug into it for work and that’s not what you are manufacturingKurt: That’s not what we are manufacturing.Chuck: OkayKurt: I think the next thing you are going to see is a lot of Bluetooth readers, right because people want to use their smartphone as credentialChuck: Yes I know I have seen that.Kurt: That’s one area but that’s problematic rightChuck: We had a show few weeks ago that said brought your own you got that one remember that bring your own device it’s a new thing that saves money and Cherise you can jump on this one I know you know about this but 90% of all breaches are because people don’t care what’s running on the phonesPaul: All I see in Star Bucks is they are having a problem swiping his figures because it won’t accept itKurt: I do think that’s something people are interested in but it hasn’t hit something it’s still something into development. I mean HID as done a really good job by the way we’re actually been manufacturing our own Bluetooth readers welted to help with that effort but again majority of people still use their plastic cardPaul: Cherise if you got a Bluetooth reader can you actually steal someone’s identity through you can right?Cherise: It depends on what data is been transferred through the Bluetooth communication absolutely.Kurt: I would say to that tough I don’t think that they are any less. They are more secure than the card.Chuck: Well! If I had that pairing thing put on a phone let say I work with you I don’t want to screw up my phone lets say can I use something for your phone and I put that pairing device that Samsung uses to transfer data and turn that thing on I could be taking stuff off your phone you didn’t even know nor that you would know.Cherise: YesKurt: I think there’s a lot of investment in that technology but again I think by in large people are still using plastic cardsChuck: So what’s AMAG working on I know you must have some secret pro lab stuff going on for this you won’t to preview anything?Kurt: Yes the biggest thing is we are still really moving down the road of our Symmetry Connect and Symmetry Guest platform because we really think that’s a game changer there isn’t another access control company in the space that does all that we do so that’s a huge different thing for us. There’s other great companies out there that provide the solution that’s just very expensive and it is third party software so for us this is really where we are pushing and I think when we look forward to the future we are going to continuously evolve into the biometric space we’re going to go into the Bluetooth space just because industry is going to require it so but for now for the next year or so this is really what we are focused on we will try to push this forward because the need is giganticPaul: Let’s take a look at industry what are you looking at you are going to break into it you haven’t get into it yetKurt: So when you think about it I think we have over thirty five thousand installs across the world right. So it’s the key for us in this industry is perfect for it because anybody that has a compliance requirement or even an internal audit requirement can utilize this service because it so difficult to manage that data it’s a process and it’s a huge game changer again nobody else can do it and you know we really are ahead of the game and from a cost perspective we’re enabling people to take advantage of it.Chuck: I am not sure break in is the right term to use for that But just saying . . . So well really I’m rethinking this now I am not thinking of calling this access control but I am thinking of calling this compliance control that brings in everything risk control I mean there’s so many things that I can keep track off it’s just not necessarily an access issue or it’s an internal access issuePaul: Oh well is that a compliance?Chuck: But Yes it’s a kind of compliance controlKurt: We all say that there’s three main compelling reasons that nobody does anything right Its going to be based on risk, its going to be based on compliance and its going to be based on cost either one or all three of those business drivers are going to be present and that what going to drive people to do something about problem that’s what our system addresses all throughChuck: Now see the operationalized… (sound muted)…it’s a technical process to integrate it into day to day operation that’s what best describe it. What level do you think you need to operate this? I understand the admin level but there could be some that gets database management and like kind of thing it feels and I guess but can the average guard now that you know basically an apple iPhone or android I mean these are people that can now utilize this technologyPaul: But there’s MicrosoftChuck: But there’s lot of people the garbage can’s we are little behind the curve on that level right so you think itsKurt: Absolutely. That’s the beauty of it that we can put it to a mobile device we could do it on a work station right again like from a visitor management prospective we made it so easy that you have to do it schedule a meeting in the network. I like that partPaul: It’s prettyKurt: So the idea is to take this very complex problem and simplify it.Chuck: We do think we did that.Paul: Oh we probably did.Chuck: No, we did something similar like that.Paul: We stole another idea.Chuck: We should put that in a box there and we would be billionaires right now. We were the first people to know. We are too far right as though access control is it says come on inKurt: Think about how long it’s taken to you know get to this pointChuck: No, we were doing this in 1996. Hiring people to program a program access and it kind of bunch of people said that we can start solving crimes with it and then how would you do that?Paul: But we did what you were talking about we are a third party and we are sucking it all technology down doing that thing and then push it back in an hour.Chuck: There are other cases there where somebody has stolen two tape deck worth seventy five thousand dollars each. So I took all the phone records at the studio and then ran them in a database against adds the recycler Out of fifteen hundred recycler one guy has same number at the studio and he was selling the thing. so we knew that it was our bad guy.Kurt: How long did it take you?Chuck: It took us around a week because we had to get the problem. Is getting the data from the phone switch I don’t know how to do that. We just had to do an export command I don’t understand what you are talking about. It really took a button pushing to do it but getting the data from the people and now the data is already in your system and that’s a way of pushing a button to get some queries.Paul: I mean it was do some. Really!Chuck: Yes But we caught the guy. He is very surprised looks to me that easierPaul: ExactlyChuck: Right Anything else you want to tell us about AMAG I’m really happy about this I was a little worried that this technology was too far for people to grab but its seems like a match matching some rows and getting people understand why it’s important and may be they are not completely driven by cost now but by a need that’s going to give internally the investmentPaul: I just think that the fact that you are saying that is they are sucking the information now that’s itChuck: I have I think I got to ask I touched down earlier Are you still finding the resistance from HR to integrate into their systems?Kurt: NoChuck: Really? Because HR never really wants you in their systemPaul: I think they have come round.Kurt: Yes they are pretty common now. So they say you are consuming it you are not pushing anything back. You are just you know and it helps them a lot it helps them in their processes tooChuck: Oh you mean they can say I am not going to give you thisKurt: Oh Yes certain data you can have certain data you cannot haveChuck: Are you guys worried about how do you encrypt the data that is the last thing we want to talk about is? How is it encrypted? How is it protected you know. Because you have a lot of data moving in between lot of servers inside a company may be a big enterprise company how do you handle that? I mean if one guy gets it can he get everything or you bifurcate the fields in the databases to…Kurt: So you know that all of our services are behind the IT’s firewall so it’s always very protective of their own ways of protecting the data. But then you know data-center have our hosted solutions and we go through rigorous penetration tests and different third party tests for all of our different clients already so to me it’s really I don’t think its itsPaul: You run your own data-center or do youKurt: We do, we have our own data-center in Burlington where we do all of our Symmetry Guest and Symmetry Connect services out of there.Chuck: Do you think most people are reluctant to do the cloud stuff or they wanna keep stuff on their in houseKurt: Its interesting because there are certain protocols where we can do host we cannot like if you go to utility space they’re just there’s no way right but then you know in the financial sector they are willing to do this so it just depends so I think you think that will be difficult but you’re starting to see more likelihood of people going to that because its just cheaper they time it to that it takes something to get up and running the amount of infrastructure required to support it maintain it as IT teams are getting smaller you know the hosted environment is becoming much more popular so services are always easier to get approved because its an apex versus and cap-ex.Paul: Services are rolled in it as well which is you know which doesn’t have any delayChuck: Kurt Takahashi VP Sales AMAG thanks for coming up this has been a fascinating discussion. Miss Cherise from CyberThreatBeGone.com. Thanks for joining us again in this great discussionCherise: Thank youChuck: Give us your website KurtKurt:www.amag.comChuck: That’s very easyKurt: Yes. Thank you very muchChuck: Thanks for coming in and thanks Cherise, thanks for joining us in Security Guy Radio. We will see you next week.

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Chuck Harold & Guests

Gail Essen HoneyWell.com | BuildingSolutions.com

Chuck HaroldThe Security Guy

Full text of radio show

Please forgive any typos, this podcast was transcribed by my typing pool comprised of volunteer stalkers.

Chuck: Welcome to Security Guy Radio. What’s your name?

Gail: My name is Gail Essen, CPP, PSP, I’m with Honeywell.

Chuck: That’s a lot of acronyms, what does it stand for. For my nieces and nephews who don’t know what that stand for?

Gail: What that stands for CPP, both of those Board, ASIS Board Certified. CPP stands for Certified Professional Protection.

Chuck: Certified Protection Specialist.

Gail: Correct and PSP is Physical Security Professional.

Chuck: Oh, I was wondering what that was. I don’t have any acronyms. Well, I’m junior, but that’s all I have. So what do you for them?

Gail: What I do for Honeywell is, we represent our enterprise level clients, so we bring in solutions that meet their multinational, they’re usually in highly regulated industry, so they have to have solutions that can help them not only deliver operational efficiencies, but also ensure that they’re compliance based.

Chuck: Well that’s a big challenge. I used to work at Fox and Disney and I used to have to hire regional guys and that’s a lot of regions, by the way right all across the country.

Gail: It is, it is.

Chuck: You know this is back in the ‘90s there really wasn’t this enterprise view. There are couple of companies that did things, right, but Honeywell’s been in this space a long time and I mean, Honeywell is synonymous with security and alarms and all kinds of things, as soon as they moved to this enterprise level, what are the challenges of the compliance area, because I think every state now has all these new regulations, and if you get it wrong as a, you know as the end user you got a problem?

Gail: There’s, a huge financial implication and there’s a reputation implication to the company, so compliance is number one driver and for the companies who take security, who implement security in their strategy as a core strategy those are the companies that really understand the nature and the impact that security has to their operations.

Chuck: Now you are finding that more companies are doing that?

Gail: Yes.

Chuck: Okay. Now, what’s interesting to me is it it’s driven by the law, by regulations…

Gail: Yes.

Chuck: Not by the motivation to protect the enterprise first and foremost, right. Sometimes you get this it’s like oh, I have to do it, I guess I will.

Gail: Well, in some cases…in some case it is to drive value to their core customers, so for example if you’re a company that produces Baby Formula or a product that’s going to affect the public a medical device for example, you do want to have to make sure that what you’re putting out there to the public is the best, it’s safe, it’s quality, and so compliance that it’s not a problem. They do, they really do drive towards safety and security.

Chuck: Okay. I understand correctly, that’s a good observation, because we’re talking about manufacturing, we’re talking about consumer products not guarding the office building and paper or something.

Gail: Correct. Yes. Yes.

Chuck: So, talk about some, you don’t have to name main clients per se, but what is kind of a big client and how do you help them across a wide enterprise? Worldwide I assume.

Gail: Well…correct. Global accounts, multinational accounts, regional accounts and really what they are looking for us to do for them is to really help them build a tech, multi-year technology roadmap as well as helping them understand how the products can deliver to their corporate strategy. How we can connect what we’re doing, how we can deliver an ROI, how we can improve operations, how we can increase the effectiveness of their manpower, how could we reduce incidents, how can, you know by using the systems and the technology behind it. We also go in there and we help them really build security plans. We’ll come in and we will do initial risk assessments and vulnerability assessments, so it’s an end-to-end solution, it’s not just about the product. In fact the product is really a secondary thought.

Chuck: It’s a good point.

Gail: It’s — we really look at the corporation and what they’re doing and try to identify and understand what that means and then bring in the appropriate solutions. The solutions never come first; the solutions come after an intensive look and feel what that company is doing.

Chuck: Now, who drives these at an enterprise level, I mean, at lower level it’s purchasing, you know, well we can’t afford it sorry there is decision made, no board meeting, right.

Gail: Right.

Chuck: At a higher level who drives these issues?

Gail: At higher level that, those decisions are really done at the more the C-Suite level, so what you look to penetrate is the CSO. Most of these companies have a CSO. They’re connected with the CFO, the CIO, so the C-Suite first, they get the value proposition. They understand how this is going to help their business, how it’s going to help their clients and help them position in the marketplace, so they are the ones that you work with first, and really it’s a collective. It’s really a family, you have IT involved, you have physical security, you have facilities, you have operations, you have HR, you have a lot of entities involved in the final decision making and the direction of the path.

Chuck: I’m really happy to hear this. I mean I’ve been doing this a long time; I’ve been in the business 32 years, white hair right. You know, Fortune 50 experience, but when I was in Fortune 50 arena, this was not at the C-level, just it wasn’t for whatever reason, right, so I’m happy to hear this is coming up to that level, because really that’s the only way to be effective.

Gail: It is.

Chuck: Nobody cared what I said as a Director of Security. I’m sorry they just didn’t, you know, but if the boss came in, and said we’re going to do this, it happens, so I mean funny example is, we initiated ID cards at Fox one day. Nobody wanted to use them and all of a sudden Mr. Murdoch shows up at the gate, uses his ID card, boy, everybody wanted to use to it. Not because they are afraid, but they want to please him, you know, that’s how it works, so when we get involved at this level, how do you handle the challenges of per se going across different countries, let’s say it’s Company A who is in 10 countries, with 10 different cultures, 10 different languages, but you really need the same security plan mostly at an enterprise level to start, right that’s where your policies come and then the policies drive down performance, right. How do you handle that part of it?

Gail: Right. Well, that is a challenge, because when you’re talking about in multiple countries, in multiple regions there are trade and different compliance, different ways of doing business. You know, EMEA, APAC, everybody it’s different than the way we do it in America, so there are different challenges you have to really work well with the local entities in that country, in that space and understand what that, culturally how they operate, because that’s the key thing you cannot be successful if you’re not dealing in their sub-culture or otherwise it’s not going to work.

Chuck: Oh, I agree with you 100%. I mean it works at a micro level, in a big corporation here, right. So when I rolled out ID cards, they’d not had ID cards in 75 years and all of a sudden who is this idiot trying to make me wear an ID card. I had to pre-sell it. I had to get, buy in agreement from all the bosses and department heads and then when they brought into it, it fell better, but it was a challenge to not, without the cultural buy-in all the technical bills and whistles and all the rules nobody cares.

Gail: Correct. So, it’s conformance to policy it’s at a minimum level that’s what you want, but you really in order to get it implemented you have to understand how they operate, how they think in, you know what is, you know, really make them understand the value to them. What it’s going to do for them, and how it’s going to improve their life or make it safer, easier.

Chuck: Now you mentioned Return on Investment, this is a big driver right now.

Gail: Yes.

Chuck: Security used to be considered a cost center. I’ve always thought it could be a profit center or at least a break-even center, right. How do you guys look at that, how do, how do you present the Return on Investment to a C-Suite?

Gail: Oh, easy.

Chuck: Oh, good. I like easy question.

Gail: Yes. I, to me the ROI is a good conversation, because if they see security as a cost center they’re looking at it completely wrong. I’ll, I give you several examples, but one is and it connects to compliance, so if we don’t have a process or something in place and you have a violation, you have an incident that’s going to cost your company to shut down. You are going to lose revenues you’re going to lose reputation in the market. You’re going — and then you’re going to get the fine on top. So, all of that combined is a, is a huge cost compared to what the minor investment would be to implement the mitigation strategy that should have been in place to prevent that in the first place.

Chuck: Yeah, you still see the data breaches, you know, Target. I love Target, any time you go to buy something Target has it right and I was very disappointed in their breach, because it didn’t need to happen.

Gail: No.

Chuck: You know, this sort of thing I think helps the ROI argument, because that’s going to cost them X amount of dollars per breach of data, when the whole system going to cost them $2 million.

Gail: Correct.

Chuck: You see what I’m saying?

Gail: Correct.

Chuck: Now, how do you sustain, here’s a big challenge I’ve always found. Honeywell comes in, we work with compliance, we change the culture. We get it all wired in, everybody is happy. Talk about sustainability.

Gail: Sustainability is a good one, because really you have to when you’re doing your original assessments you have to, you have to maintain those assessments, so you don’t just come in and do your one assessment, call it good, implement the mitigation tactics and then move on, that’s not how it works, so really that’s what we do, that’s our sweet spot, because we kind of involve and help you build a multi-year roadmap and it’s not just around technology, it’s about policy building, it’s about changing the culture, because sometimes it’s not there yet. Oftentimes, these companies are they’re a conglomerate of companies that have been come together through acquisitions…

Chuck: That’s right, all different cultures, business cultures.

Gail: Correct, so you have a lot of different thoughts of — they were raised up in one sub-culture for security, one has a higher level than the other, and so you have to get everybody sort of evened out, and that takes a while, and so they’re building that road map, building that multi-year plan, that is what we do and we do it very well.

Chuck: Now, do you offer a service, you know, paid service or whatever that assigned somebody as a, what the best word would be the Project Manager, you know the contact. That kind of comes in and audits your own system for them, because I found, you are not – installer, we are talking your straddle level, C level, but you are an integrator. You may have to integrate the local camera guy, who put this in and make his cameras work with whatever system you are using in such and you know what happens is, if somebody puts a camera and then they get, the leave and then three years later, “Oh, how come you don’t have video because the camera broke we didn’t fix it. How do you handle that sustained maintenance and I guess testing is a good, a good way to describe the system. You know, really challenge the system, make sure it’s working.

Gail: Yes, so we — as part of, as part of any solid plan, there is a built-in service side component to it, There’s professional services at the onset, but there is a long on-going service plan that goes with it, so every year we come in, and we’ll do annual test and inspections. Typically what we do in these large enterprise solutions you can’t just go in and say, “You know March 1 we’re going to test everything”. So, over the course of the year everything gets tested once, at least once and then what happens is you build out, say, “Okay” and then also the systems are getting smarter, so they can report to you, “Hey my camera isn’t working, or maybe I have analytics on there that tells me that the camera has been spray painted over.

So it’s not its working but it’s not recording anything because there is no imaging, so they’re, so with the annual test and maintenance programs that we have available that’s how we can sustain the systems and elongate their life. If you take even a simple door application for example where over, you know, I’ve worked in a new construction, so if you build out, they occupy and after one year the building starts to shift and these doors get out of sync and if you don’t fix that you’re going to shorten the life of your electric strike by years, so it’s an easy thing to do, just go and look at that visually test it, and then you’re going to elongate all of your solutions and your ROI then just continues to build.

Chuck: The reason I asked whether you have an internal security department in a large enterprise or an external contractor. There tends to be high turnover in security departments. More so the contractor let’s say, right.

Gail: Right.

Chuck: Who owns this after you have put it in? It’s driven from the C-Suite which is fabulous, right you need that, but who owns it down on a day-to-day working level, is it just security in their department or are there other partners in that help to maintain that?

Gail: On the client side it’s typically managed by the CSO, who then he has his armies of folks, so regionally they use their Regional Directors. They also work with the CIO, the infrastructure folks, so they team up very well that way, and then they drive that out to the enterprise level and once it’s in place and we have that ongoing plan in place, if you stick to the plan you will, you’ll have a successful security program at the end of the day that’s how it works.

Chuck: What is one of your largest enterprises? You don’t have to name a name, but you can if you want to it’s up to you and you can give me some, give me some scale on it how many countries or regions that kind of thing.

Gail: Oh, we have many that are across the globe thousands and thousands of readers and cameras thousands and….

Chuck: They can kind of act as one overall system.

Gail: Correct.

Chuck: Separated by regions and countries.

Gail: Correct and so what happens is they acquire another company, then we go in and we try, we look at what that company has in place, what needs to change to get to their standards and then start implementing the changes…

Chuck: Your challenge is with integration, right.

Gail: Yes.

Chuck: Last year somebody told me that as of 2014 analogue cameras still out sold digital cameras.

Gail: That’s unbelievable.

Chuck: It is, isn’t, right.

Gail: It’s hard to believe.

Chuck: So, you come into a company and they just bought Company Z and they got an Earl tape deck and you know Pelco Camera and it’s circa 1984.

Gail: And it’s working.

Chuck: It’s working.

Gail: And they say why do we have to replace it.

Chuck: Exactly, but how do you integrate it, how do you bring them into that. I mean, you know maybe there’s a corporate mandate and they have to do it, but what are the technical challenges or something like that?

Gail: Well, the technology challenges are the, traditionally the infrastructure, so you know, you then you have to outfit with encoders and routers and switches and switch everything, even if you can sustain if the camera is good and solid, you can sustain that camera and just convert the backbone to the technology that you needed to be, and then get it to the VMS that it’s going to attach to, because ultimately that’s where you have to get it to anyway, you have to get it to the VMS that you are talking to, so you, but that is a challenge, because usually these things, and you know, you’re going to find these cameras out on a pole and the cable has been buried and no longer there’s no accessibility in that pipe anymore and we’ve run into all kinds of challenges and it’s big.

Chuck: It is. I find going to these conventions that we have a lot of smart people here that have a lot of solutions, but when you take all those solutions for manufacturing side, it’s taken to the operation side that’s the biggest challenge. There is a very sad case in San Francisco few years ago, where women in a hospital walked off her bed, and they couldn’t find her and they looked for her, and three weeks later they found her dead in the stairwell, locked in the stairwell. Oh, we didn’t see the camera is broken, but, the camera worked, oh, about a year and a half ago, all right and nobody thought that well the camera’s out that’s significant. My question was why didn’t the guard walk the stairwells, all right? So yeah the operations level is always, it’s always the challenge. We have the technology, but how do we get in place, right? So do you have any, any good stories? There is also some more stories about something that succeeded or you are called in because the company waited until after they were hit for something then they put it.

Gail: That’s almost always unfortunately, that’s almost always the case.

Chuck: Oh, it’s that almost always when you get a call is after something catastrophic.

Gail: Yes because, you know, we will try to approach them, I shouldn’t say almost always, but in often times that happens, because you approach them they say well, if and truly if they, if you can tell the companies where security is core to their strategy or not, because if it’s not core to their strategy they’re going to wait to that devastation hits then implement. Those are the companies that then all of a sudden it becomes mission-critical.

Chuck: And then it has to be done tomorrow.

Gail: Correct. So, yes, we have tons of those that happen, and unfortunately we try to go ahead of that and pre-warn them, give them you know our case studies and our long examples, and how we can help them, but until if they, if it’s not core to their strategy they are not going to implement it.

Chuck: Well, one thing I like about Honeywell, because you guys have been around a long time. I didn’t look it up, but it’s, I mean Honeywell was around since I was a kid in some capacity.

Gail: Right very, very old.

Chuck: So, you are a trusted brand.

Gail: Yes.

Chuck: That has some experience and Honeywell is not going to go away tomorrow.

Gail: No.

Chuck: Right. What’s Honeywell got on the table that they’re working on, that could be the latest, greatest thing anything in the pipeline or some of your latest products that you might think people are interested in?

Gail: We have, actually we have, we really do have quite a few products and the thing about what we do is, we can take our what we call our EBI solution, and we…

Chuck: Spell that for me.

Gail: E-B-I.

Chuck: What’s that stand for?

Gail: EBI.

Chuck: Okay, Enterprise Business something.

Gail: Something like that and so what EBI does is, it will actually connect not only to the security solutions, but it has hooks to other things, like energy manager, access control, VMS all kinds of things, you can take a EBI as a core engine and incorporate that in to your whole building so…

Chuck: So, can you come in, can Honeywell System come in and integrate and work with an older proprietary system whatsoever?

Gail: We can because a lot of the Honeywell actually owns a lot of like Allerton and some of these other companies out there who have other subsystems that we can talk to, on a HVAC side, the backbone is they have common protocols that we talk to BACnet for example. So, yes we can communicate with a lot of these other solutions that are out there.

Chuck: And HVAC is seldom integrated with the security department. Now at the studio we had to, because we were on the air and we’re live and if you didn’t something would happen and it happened one day we called it Black Sunday, Fox went off the air for the X-Files. Cost them $125,000 a minute and they are off for 45 minutes. What happened was we got an alarm, because we had an integration that guard saw it and said, “hey, TOC your air-condition is not working don’t worry about it and we called them three times and they didn’t pay attention, because they thought security don’t know what they were talking about, right, and they went off the air, so I’m glad to hear that we have that and of course Honeywell is in that space with thermostats and it had been there forever. So, it’s kind of a natural connection.

Gail: Correct. Right, it’s a natural. Yeah, so you get a whole system solution, and the beauty of it is you have the core engine and then you just bolt on when needed or where needed, where applicable, so again we don’t come in with a solution first, we look at the enterprise and what their needs are, and then design around that, but the idea being that you have this capability to orchestrate your entire building and a lot of times and then also include into that the fire perspective as well.

Chuck: They’re big in air space as well, right.

Gail: It’s life, its life safety, so everything connects in and at the end of the day, when you’re talking about a true plan, a holistic plan you have to consider all of these things. Energy savings what that going to do to your building, your HVAC, how you’re protecting your people, how you’re getting them in and out, the fire components, so it really is a holistic approach.

Chuck: I think in the past they were looked at silos, facilities handles air conditioning.

Gail: Right.

Chuck: Fire and safety handles fire, it really has to be integrated together.

Gail: It does.

Chuck: You know what do you guys do about the Black Cats, the hackers. They just had a, at Christmas time, the first successful hack of a public utility happened at the Ukraine and really nobody heard about it, but it took out all the power for eight hours, and this is a big problem, so how does Honeywell approach that? You know, fortifying the system.

Gail: Yeah, so connecting also back to the EBI there’s another cyber component an InfoSec component to that, so that’s just another, we can do that, we can do risk assessments in that area, is that on, “Okay, we can do risk assessments in that area as well, so the, that’s a huge thing, because you can place a camera, an IP camera and that’s your back door in or your front door in, really.

Chuck: People forget that a camera is now a computer for lack of a better term on a network, right.

Gail: Correct. Or even a reader, an IP based reader same thing, so if you don’t put it in right and set it up to protect your network, if you don’t have, you have that proper layered security in place then you’ve, you’ve just left yourself vulnerable to the world.

Chuck: You know, there was a survey years ago where they found that some guy in Ukraine figured out that most passwords of cameras are password underscore zero and nobody ever resets, the installers didn’t, right and he was logging into cameras all around the world seeing all kinds of stuff. So, Honeywell gets that part and that’s good, because a lot of time the installers, says, “Okay I got my camera done see you later buddy. Does Honeywell have an IT department per se at an enterprise level that works with the IT you know CISO. Sometimes the CISO and the CSO, yeah, they talk, but they’re still separate departments, right?

Gail: Correct, yes, so we have, we have entities that we work with, Honeywell, you know as a corporation we do outsourcing like any other company does of certain fields and the IT is one of those that we do, but we can leverage our own groups that we use to come in and work with us on these projects to work with the CISO or CIO.

Chuck: You are making sure when you put the camera in the password is not password underscore zero.

Gail: Oh, absolutely not, no. Our technicians, so we have, we have programs where we have mandatory fields that they have to fill out and to make sure that these things are being changed, and that’s again all part of the holistic solution, so you take this big approach and you have to drill it all the way down to that very final thing, because that’s if you don’t do that very simple thing…

Chuck: It’s the simple, the whole systems on, right?

Gail: Right.

Chuck: So, enterprise level corporations and people tend to like single point of contact.

Gail: Yes.

Chuck: Maybe it’s not practical for you in 10 countries. You’re not going to fly around the 10 countries or maybe you are, right, but tell me how Honeywell represents itself with the C-Suite, is there one point of contact that drives the project and gets it all done, you know what I’m saying?

Gail: Right, so we have a couple different approaches that we actually do have and oftentimes they do want a single point of contact, but what the other thing that we do very well is we’ll connect our C-Suite to their C-Suite.

Chuck: Oh, that’s interesting.

Gail: They are likely already connected, so we’ll take like David Cote our CEO and he probably knows their CEOs. So, they are already connected, so we connect people at the appropriate levels and so while I would be a single point of contact overarching to the whole enterprise, they still have their sub connections across…

Chuck: Of course, yeah to get it done and you know why they want a single point of contact, right.

The patented GPS enabled “Smart” insoles fit easily into most adult shoes and let you monitor the whereabouts of loved ones who may have a tendency to wander or at risk of becoming disoriented and lost. No need for them to remember to carry a separate tracking device, just slip on their shoes and go – like they normally would. Seamless and effortless.

You can track their location through any smartphone, tablet or web browser, set up text and e-mail alerts if they leave or enter defined areas on a map.

GPS SmartSoles provide peace of mind for family members and those caring for the millions of people suffering from memory impairment and wandering which can be caused by Alzheimer’s, Dementia, Autism, Traumatic Brain Injury or other cognitive memory disability.

Discreet Monitoring

The ergonomic GPS SmartSoles* slide into shoes and feel like regular insoles.
Loved ones can be tracked unobtrusively and remain free from the stigma of “lock on” bracelets.

Easy Mapping

Use a computer, tablet or smartphone to go online and view the location history on a map. Just login to the online portal, no additional software needed.
Includes the free Smart Locator mobile app (iOs & Android) for access to the location of loved ones at the touch of a button.

Reliable Coverage

Cellular technology within GPS SmartSole enables connectivity in the U.S. wherever 2G T-Mobile and/or AT&T GSM coverage is available.
1-2 day battery life with normal use ensures you are connected when you need it most.
Customized Alerts

Create geozones around addresses to receive notifications when the GPS SmartSoles* approach or leave specified areas.
Receive alerts such as ‘power on’ and ‘low battery’, which can be sent to multiple caregivers via email or text message.

Chuck Harold & Guests

Patrick Bertagna CEO – GTX Corp – GPSSmartSole.com

Chuck HaroldThe Security Guy

Full text of radio show

Please forgive any typos, this podcast was transcribed by my typing pool comprised of volunteer stalkers.

Chuck Harold: Welcome! We’ve got to get you a fade button, dude!

Jarvis Essex: Applause already said.

Chuck: We want to pretend people are actually in studio watching us, besides you.

Jarvis: It does fade, you know.

Chuck: Alright. Welcome to a something or other version of The Security Guy Radio with my engineer in crime, Mr. Jarvis. How are you, Jarvis?

Jarvis: I’m good, I’m good.

Chuck: Now, I want to show you something. I’ve been getting a few complains, so I thought I bring in my new bulletproof vest that I got right here. Half-kidding! You know I went to ISC West in Vegas, right?

Jarvis: Right.

Chuck: So a guy I met there, www.bulletsafe.com. Bulletproof vests are traditionally about $900 and they are custom-made and so on for police officers. This guy makes this version for guards, $299. Same level. Same threat level 3, and stops, you know, a 44Magnum. So any guards, not any guards, all the guards, listening to this show: checkout www.bulletsafe.com! We are going to do a show about that from ISC West. And I probably did about ten shows, it’s a really interesting thing to talk about, a lot of interesting products.

Jarvis: Ok.

Chuck: But first I thought that we talk about statistics, right? So more statistics are in. 58,421 listeners! Uniqueness!

Jarvis: Really? I think I’ve heard some applause!

Chuck: Yeah! Is that? Is the applause going to stop immediately? Ok. So here is some other stats, right? So on this podcast now, you know how I always say: “follow me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, Tublr, Google+, YouTube, Soundcloud, Pinterest, TheGirlSight!” Remember I say that?

Jarvis: Mhm
.

Chuck: Now I’m going to say 97 countries. I’m also going to say we are on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher and Spreaker now. Soon to be on iHeartRadio.

Jarvis: Oh, wow!

Chuck: And I cross my fingers! I think we are very close to that! Now, Spreaker has… No Stitcher! Stitcher has 60,000 shows and we are ranking on the 9,840.

Jarvis: That’s pretty good!

Chuck: It’s pretty good, that’s pretty good! That’s respectable for a new show, right? So I kind of want to throw that out there a little note to follow us on all of those social media sites, because people always ask: how do I get this show, because I can’t listen while it’s on. So remember, if you have iTunes for Apple; TuneIn, Stitcher and Spreaker, you can follow us. And remember, on this show “guard” is a verb, not a noun, I protect you with my voice, and I’m the only post-certified radio show that can actually arrest you on air. You do know that, right?

Jarvis: Yeah.

Chuck: Alright. Because I went to the police academy, I’m still certified, right? Alright, so these have been the statistics. One thing I did find out during my trip was this… You know what “wearables” are?

Jarvis: I’ve heard of them.

Chuck: Ok. It’s not your underwear, it’s something else where you…

Jarvis: Underuse?

Chuck: It’s not underuse.

Jarvis: Ok.

Chuck: It’s not those animals, those types of cleaning products you use to match your top to your bottom, because I know you’re challenged there. These are where we take technology and incorporate that into something you might wear on your wrist. Typically, you know, wrist watches are wearables, right? That’s a classic one. They have things that are kind of incorporated in clothing and stuff. But on I think that people are unaware of, it’s pretty much a brand new product, is one called “SmartSole”, GPS SmartSole, and we are going to talk about this. This is actually a device. We are going to show it here. You can see this on the camera, right?

Jarvis: Mhm.

Chuck: This device goes in the sole, right? It’s kind of DoctorShaw kind of thing, right? Just
fits in the bottom of your shoe, GPS tracking.

Jarvis: Wow!

Chuck: Primarily used for, initially Alzheimer’s patients, right? Because that’s a big problem! It’s what we are going to show today. Now, I had personal experience with Alzheimer’s. About 44million people in the World have that. One in 4 with the disease happened diagnosed, but the other four, they don’t think that they’re not diagnosed and they still have it, right? So it’s a big problem!

Jarvis: Mhm.

Chuck: So I want to welcome Patrick Ber…

Patrick Bertagna: Bertagna

Chuck: Bertagna. There is a G there, I’m sorry about that.

Patrick: It’s silenced.

Chuck: I knew I would blew it if I did that! But he is the CEO of GTX Corp and you make these smart, GPS SmartSole, and I want to talk about that today. Welcome to the show!

Patrick: Well, thanks, Chuck! Thanks for having me!

Chuck: This is a really exciting product to me! And when I saw it, I said: oh, this is new! Has this been done before? Right? Because it’s logical, right? But not all things in security are logical, obviously, so… I’m glad you came up with it! Tell us what GTX does? Because GTX is in the wearables market, and this one of your products, we are going to talk about his today, but just give us a background on yourself and GTX?

Patrick: Sure. So yeah, GTX is in the tracking and location monitoring business. And we developed an entire platform of products, and hardware, and software, connectivity, and we package that technology in different form-factors. So our flagship product is the GPS SmartSole. And we put a lot of minute-razed GPS and cellular electronics, and bluetooth electronics, inside of a wearable insole. So think DoctorShaw’s meets LowJack.

Chuck: Right.

Patrick: And the reason that we put all these electronics in footwear… There are multiple reasons, but primarily you have a lot of room to work with.

Chuck: That’s a good point, yeah! It’s a good point!

Patrick: Imagine other wearables, so watch, or a pendant, or a neckless, or something like that, you don’t have that much room to work with underwear and socks. Secondly, you are protecting the electronics from the environment, because your foot is on top of them, you’ve got a shoe surrounding it. So you are really encapsulating all of those electronics. Again, if it’s something on your wrist that could easily be slammed, banged-up, even taken-off. And so it’s really an invisible technology, right? And the target market is people with cognitive memory disorders. So Alzheimer’s, Dementia, Autism, traumatic brain injury.

Chuck: Autism? Good point, yeah.

Patrick: Autism, yeah. 3 million people in the United States have Autism.

Chuck: You know, I was reading the statistics on this for Alzheimer’s, right? So the cost… There’s about 44 million people affected. And the cost worldwide is 605 billion dollars, which 1% of the entire world’s gross domestic product. 44 million people cause that much of a cost to, you know, dealing with it, right?

Patrick: Yeah, if it was its own economy, it would be 18th in the World, ranked 18 in the World.

Chuck: That’s unbelievable! It’s growing, right?

Patrick: Yeah, and it’s growing! It’s 44 million today, but if add-in Dementia, and if you add-in traumatic brain injury, and if you add-in Autism, the number is close to a 100 million. Our target-market is a 100 million people!

Chuck: Oh yeah, because that’s right-Alzheimer’s one market. Wow!

Patrick: Yeah, but if you look all the other elements, and the statistics are such that by the year 2050, that number is expected to grow to 277 million!

Chuck: Worldwide?

Patrick: Yeah, worldwide.

Chuck: Well, that’s 2/3 of the population of the United States. That’s unbelievable!

Patrick: Well, no-by then it would be the population of the United States! 277 million.

Chuck: Oh man! Unbelievable!

Patrick: Yeah.

Chuck: And this is really partly because of the baby-boomer thing, we got a lot of older people, but… And who knows what causes this, but there seems to be just a rise in these sorts of brain things.

Patrick: Well, it’s perfect storm. We have: people are living longer to the advancement of biomedicine, and technology, and so forth, so you are definitely living longer. People take care of themselves a lot more. Especially here in Southern California, as you well know, people are very health-consciences, you know. They eat a lot of tofu, and fruits, and nuts, and yogurt, and they exercise, right? A lot of people exercise. But unfortunately, that same generation did a lot of experimenting back in the day and so you have actually a perfect storm. You have people living longer and physically being capable to play tennis, and golf, and ride bikes, but that doesn’t mean that they brain fully functions at the age of 70 and 80+.

Chuck: Right. And I had personal experiences, like I said. My grandmother who lived to be about 90… My one grandmother lived to be 100, fully cognitive, knew what she was doing, fell asleep one day, didn’t wake up, what a way to live, right?

Patrick: And what go to also!

Chuck: What a way to go! Talking about covering wagon stuff, she was born 1888 and she remembered everything!

Patrick: Wow!

Chuck: It was amazing! My other grandmother, on my mom’s side, pretty good until up to 95, then fell out of bed at the hospital and went into a state of Dementia for about year and a half. Couldn’t remember things, you know, falsely remember things, made up stuff. And then my uncle, this guy was in the air force program, the astronaut program, flew, also, he ran 10miles a day until he was 75 years old. And one day-couldn’t open the door, couldn’t write a check. Very sad! And it took about a year and a half, you know, we saw him deteriorate. And I’ve dealt with this right ahead, you know, like babysit the adults or, you know, help them in the middle of the night, or take care of them. And this is very, very stressful on families! And I think because of the economy the way it is now, we see more families living together, or mom and dad are living with their parents, right? To take care, and save money, and things like that. So I think this affects a lot of people, more than people realize.

Patrick: Yeah. The bleed-over in terms of the caregivers, in terms of the stress, is immeasurable. Because they are the ones that are burdened with the 24/7 monitoring.

Chuck: Yeah.

Patrick: And I mean I can tell you story, after story, after story that we’ve heard, but for the most part, you know, the common theme is that there is no rhyme and reason, there is no the normally wonder in 3 O’Clock of the afternoon, or it’s every Tuesday. So literally cannot even go into the bathroom and then come out and expect that your loved one will be there. They could just run out of the door in a nanosecond.

Chuck: My neighbor, and I won’t say her name, but she listens, I hope she is listening tonight, they have… Her mother-in-law lives there and she is 97 years old and exactly what you are saying happens: she literally is a prisoner in her house. Because she has to be so diligent about making sure that something doesn’t happen and mom does get outside, and she has gotten out couple of times, it’s happened, right? And with this I think it would just take a huge burden off. In other words you are still going to be diligent, but on the one chance that something happens, you are not going to then panic, because now you have a recourse to find her.

Patrick: Well, it’s exactly the point. You still have to rely on a responsible caretaker.

Chuck: Still going to be caretaker.

Patrick: You still have to be a caretaker. So this is not… No technology elevates you from those responsibilities. But when something goes wrong, and the statistics show that 60% of people with memory disorders will wonder…

Chuck: 60%?

Patrick: 60%. So when you look at that number of a 100million people that are afflicted worldwide, 60million of them will wonder repetitively.

Chuck: Oh, it’s repetitively? Not just on occasion…? Oh, wow!

Patrick: Well, repetitively could mean 5 times a year. But if you are the police officers that get that 911 call whether it’s five times a week, or 5 times a year, it’s… You have to go out there and look for that person. So when you talk, you know, you brought in the cost, so the cost of the caregiver of the municipalities that have to go and dead with these situations, is enormous. And the stress is unbelievable.

What happens is that if you don’t find this person, this is another very important statistics, if you don’t find that person within 24 hours, and as being a law-enforcement you know this, the first 2 to 6 hours missing are critical in any missing person and as the time goes on, the likelihood of finding that person diminish and the likelihood to find that person alive and well diminishes and so forth, right? So statistically, and this is FBI stats, if not found, a missing person not found within 24 hours, there is a 50% chance that they will be found dead.

Chuck: 50%? That’s very high! And 24 hours is a blink of an eye!

Patrick: In this demographic.

Chuck: Right.

Patrick: You have to understand. This demographic, if you are 75-80 years old and you have Alzheimer’s, or even if you are 15 years old and you have Autism, you are as well-equipped physically and mentally to deal with the environment.

Chuck: And you can be a victim very easily, very taken advantage of.

Patrick:And you can be taken advantage of. You may be on other medications, so if you don’t have access to those medications, that could be a problem there. The likelihood of you left your house without a proper clothing, right? So if it gets cold or wet, I mean, you are more susceptible and 70-80 year old person is more susceptible to cold then let’s say you and I, right? So those are the facts, those are the reasons that 50% of them not found in the 24hours, could be found dead.

Chuck: And your cost, and I’m a little bit rusty on this, but let’s say Burbank PD we got, you know, 75 cops, it’s 5-6 square miles, it’s an average size police department, but the cost to rule-out, you know, all the day shift and bring in some dogs, and whatever…

Patrick: Mhm.

Chuck: These are “critical missing people” we call them, right?

Patrick: Yes.

Chuck: “Critical missing” means we don’t just take reports and say: thanks, we’ll call you in the morning-we get out and look, and do what we can, right?

Patrick: That’s right.

Chuck: That cost can be anywhere from you know couple of thousand bucks for couple cups hunting to like 10-20 thousand dollars.

Patrick: The statistics… And again, I was told this by multiple police departments that we’ve talked to from New York police department, the largest police department in the country, down to San Diego Search and Rescue or Saint Luis’s, you know, smaller, more regional police departments, but they’ve all confirmed, small or large, it’s on average, it’s about 10 to 11 thousand dollars.

Chuck: On average?

Patrick: Yeah, on average.

Chuck: Wow!

Patrick: On average. Now, if you have a very severe missing person case, where it’s days on in, or weeks on in, you have to put a helicopter up in the sky, you now are going into hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I don’t need to tell you again that you know that what rows downs hill, so that person isn’t found or is found dead, there are… You know, the mayor gets the phone call…

Chuck: Yeah, it’s a problem.

Patrick: And then you know it all rows downs hill. And so in the end of the day, why not empower, I mean that’s what we believe is so advantageous about this product is, you know, empowering the caregivers to just pull out their Smartphone, you know: mom, dad, junior, whoever went missing, they are not in the house or they are not wherever they are supposed to be, pull out your Smartphone, push your button and you’ll know exactly where they are.

Chuck: So let’s take a look at this real quick. Jarvis, tell me if I’m in frame here, I think I am. So this just looks like anything I’d buy at Walgreens, it’s very similar. Exactly the same, you can’t even tell. And the technology is right here, and by the way, if you are listening to this on podcast go to YouTube and you can see this, but looks like a traditional sole insert, padded. And this is waterproof, which is unique, right?

Patrick: Yeah, the materials themselves are waterproof.

Chuck: And sealed?

Patrick: And all sealed. And then the unit itself is capsulated in epoxy material. And the reason for that is when we first developed the product we went to go visit the some Autistic foundations, and they all told us that children with Autism are more attracted to water.

Chuck: I’ve heard that, yes. I’ve heard that.

Patrick: That is in their nature to be attracted to water. And so we said: a tracking device if has to be efficient and effective for people with Autism, has to be waterproofed. So you can actually stick this in a swimming pool for six hours and it will still work.

Chuck: That’s fabulous! And to charge it goes on a pad, you don’t have to plug it in, you just place it on the pad.

Patrick: Well, the pad needs to be plugged in.

Chuck: Yeah, I’m sorry. The pad needs to be plugged in. But we are not plugging anything into the Sole…

Chuck: We are going to just place this down on the charger. It takes about 2 hours to charge?

Patrick: Yeah, couple of hours to charge.

Chuck: And how long does it last? Three days?

Patrick: Yeah, two to three days.

Chuck: Ok, so the caregiver just needs to get into the routine of doing that.

Patrick: Yeah, every couple of days just get that done. It’s got a motion sensor, so when not in use it goes to sleep.

Chuck: Oh, that’s good.

Patrick: So it’s kind of like you know, just like the sleep mode on your phone or your computer.

Chuck: And GPS now these days is so sophisticated that we can actually tell: altitude, so someone’s got a high-rise building wondering around, he got lost in a high-rise building, we would know maybe approximately on what floor they are on, maybe?

Patrick: You can tell, again depending on the windows, and the…

Chuck: Sure.

Patrick: And the availability of the satellites, and so forth… But GPS gives you latitude and longitude, it gives you altitude, it gives you bearing and it gives you speed.

Chuck: And nowadays this stuff are accurate within ten feet, right? I mean, it pretty damn
good!

Patrick: Yeah, yeah. You know, we advertise that it’s accurate within 37 feet, so 10meters or so.

Chuck: You should be able to handle finding within 37 feet, yeah.

Patrick: If you put it into context, believe it or not, we actually have some people that don’t like that answer. They expect it to be accurate within a foot. But you know, put into context, you’ll be able to find somebody anywhere in the World! So if you live in Los Angelis, and let’s say, your mother lives in Buffalo, New York, right? You will be able to pull out your phone and know exactly where she is, within 37 feet. I think that’s acceptable!

Chuck: I think that’s acceptable! Absolutely! Jarvis, do you think that’s acceptable? I think that is. So we have some of these in here. You have some tags that kind of go…

Patrick: Those are for medical IDs.

Chuck: Yeah.

Patrick: So for people that are seniors or children with Autism, you want to keep all their medical records. In that way, that’s a complimentary product, so if they are found, first responder can actually scan the QR code on that tag and then get the full medical records of that person.

Chuck: Pretty cool!

Patrick: So if they are allergic to certain drugs, or diabetic, or epileptic, or things like that.

Chuck: And I know some people that have autistic children and here is a challenge that I hear time and time again: parent buys him a phone… And this one person by the way, is a high-functioning autistic… I think it’s called… What’s the anti-social one where you are kind of…? Aspergers.

Patrick: Aspergers.

Chuck: So high-functioning, but still anti-social, and they can’t, they won’t carry the phone, they don’t remember to carry the phone, they don’t want to carry the phone.

Patrick: Or they are going to drop the phone. They will give it away. They will trade it with somebody for an ice-cream or something.

Chuck: Exactly. A very few people are going to go out in Chicago without shoes on regardless of what your level mental incompetency is, so I think this is a great idea. Now, some of them are marked, SmartSole on the bottom. And then we have, as we say in police work, an unmarked sole.

Patrick: Undercover!

Chuck: Undercover sole! And when I asked you about this, of course the answer was obvious after I heard it: this is not the only application, although the Alzheimer’s and people with mental disabilities is of course the best application, right?

Patrick: Yeah, it’s the needs market.

Chuck: The needs market, yes.

Patrick: You really need to have a solution for these people because like I said, hundred million people worldwide, 60% of them, I mean 60million of them, wonder. So you need a solution for that!

Chuck: Oh yeah, that’s…

Patrick: Ok.

Chuck: But, and you know I got an executives, and I got to keep track of them, because this is just what I got to do as a security, because I can’t get this guy disappear, or get kidnapped, or something like that. So these are the executives. Police officers could be an application, right?

Patrick: Yeah.

Chuck: Maybe even undercover cops?

Patrick: Undercover cops, yeah.

Chuck: Talk about some of the things that you apply this to.

Patrick: Yeah, so we’ve had a lot of interest from high-level executives. We’ve had interest from media companies. We’ve had interest when actually the State Department called.

Patrick: I mean, we’ve got a lot of that happened. On any given day there are probably 10.000 if not more news-crews worldwide.

Chuck: 10.000? Wow!

Patrick: Well, think about Routers.

Chuck: That’s true.

Patrick: And Ap. And Fox.

Chuck: Oh, you forgot one: Security Guy Radio!

Patrick: Oh yeah, of course, the Security Guy Radio.

Chuck: Jarvis, he forgot Security Guy Radio! Put one of these in my shoe right away!

Patrick: You know, when you touring around in the Middle East we want to make sure that we know where you are, so yes, State Department. Military, but not for soldiers; you know, soldiers are carrying around 150pounds pack, they got a whole bunch of stuff in that pack, they got electronics and all that; but all the support staff that, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, that are not military.

Chuck: Like civilian support?

Patrick: Yeah, civilian support staff. But the Military, the Pentagon wants to know where all of those people are.

Chuck: Sure!

Patrick: So we had a lot of conversations with you know military operations in that regard. But high-level executives… A lot of these guys have key-man insurance, they have perhaps their own security teams. I’m sure you are aware of some people like that?

Chuck: Yeah, some of the, under Sarbanes-Oxley, what is changed over the years is that where the corporation used to pay for a lot of the these kind of closet, private things, now they don’t.

Patrick: Yeah.

Chuck: And executives have to have their security paid for of their own pocket. And that would entail… You know, the corporation makes some recommendations, experts, right? But I can see this when an executive would want to have some kind of personal tracking and by the way, for their families.

Patrick: Sure!

Chuck: I mean executives are targets, and so are their families. So these are all kinds of things…

Patrick: Yeah.

Chuck: What I like about this, and maybe you can help me with this. Verizon, you see this dumb phone I like to call it, it hardly ever works. I am a heavy user. And if my GPS works 75% of the time, I’m happy. But one reason it doesn’t is because I have five another things going around here, right? Signal, battery and stuff, right?

Patrick: Yeah.

Chuck: I like this because it stands alone, it’s its own system. And if, I know this is tied to the phone as a smart app, but really the app doesn’t make this thing function.

Patrick: All the guts are built-in – everything that is on your phone is in there.

Chuck: Yeah. Google’s GPS function of Google in my Phone and if this isn’t working, I don’t have GPS. But if my phone goes down with this app, I can log in to a desktop, I can log in from across the country.

Patrick: That’s right!

Chuck: And I like that the device stands alone in that way.

Patrick: That’s right.

Chuck: Now, tell us why you didn’t utilize this as a marker for the phone? Because you could do that, right? This could be just a tag that ties to your phone GPS system. But it stands alone.

Patrick: Right. The whole reason… I mean, it would be a lot less expensive, a lot easier to develop. But then you are relying on so many: I was having the phone on them. So let’s start with our target market. Anybody that has a memory disorder, you can’t rely on them having a phone. 65-75-80 year old person will most like not going to be walking around with a Smartphone.

Chuck: Well, I can’t get my dad to answer his phone! He’s 80 years old and he’s a pretty smart guy! It’s just a cultural thing.

Patrick: That’s right! The high-level executive syndrome, a situation, again: you got caught by the bad guys, they are going to pat you down, they are going to take your phone right away. So this being a self-contained technology really has benefits not only from the cover or undercover aspect, but also because it doesn’t do anything else, it doesn’t text, it doesn’t e-mail, it doesn’t Facebook, it doesn’t Instagram, it doesn’t do all of those great things that we do with our Smartphone’s. All it does is keeps track of where you are and reports that information back to a central portal. And because of that, that’s all it does, it can sustain three days battery life. You phone will never last three days!

Chuck: Mine doesn’t last three hours sometimes! It just drains!

Patrick: Yeah.

Chuck: Now, I’m going to assume, tell me if I’m wrong, that I can set a geofence around my house, so if grandma starts walking away, it’s going to send me a text and say: grandma just made it out of the front door?

Patrick: 100%!

Chuck: Ok, that’s good. And you can make that geofence as big as you want? You can make the neighborhood, you can make it as large as you want?

Patrick: 200yards minimum and there is no maximum limit.

Chuck: Oh, 200yards minimum?

Patrick: Yeah.

Chuck: Ok, so I couldn’t draw it out around the bedroom?

Patrick: No.

Chuck: But the house.

Patrick: And the reason is… You could draw it down, but we always suggest that you set it to 200meters, because otherwise you are going to be so updated with alerts.

Chuck: Right.

Patrick: And eventually when it’s going to matter, you are going to maybe not pay as much attention.

Chuck: No, exactly.

Patrick: It’s got to matter. So if mom went from the bedroom to the bathroom, from the bathroom to the kitchen, and from the kitchen to the backyard, and from the backyard even to the next door neighbor’s house, do you really want to be notified every five minutes of that? But if mom walks two blocks away from the house, just what about 200 meters is, and then you should get notified.

Chuck: Yeah and what I like about it is you could also draw geofence around let’s say specifically dangerous areas, a pool, a freeway … hey, that’s a critical way but we have to …

Patrick: We heard a gut-wrenching story last year where a woman in Florida every day would get up, walk out of the house and make a right turn and two blocks away would be a little shopping area where she buys some groceries or medication. And one day she got up and instead of making a right turn, she made a left turn and she kept walking down the street and she walked for 8 miles until it dead-ended into a lake. She walked right into the lake and got eaten by an alligator.Chuck: Oh my gosh. How sad!Patrick: Yeah, very sad, very tragic, very sad.

Chuck: And she was impaired in some way or …

Patrick: She had dementia. She just got disoriented and just didn’t realise it. We just heard a story recently that a man in the north east in the winter got up out of bed in the middle of the night, just with his … he put his shoes on but he was still in his pajamas but he did put his shoes on which is interesting and I will get to that, there is a reason for that. It is just like because it is like our … it is called procedural memory …

Chuck: Oh, yeah, your core basics.

Patrick: Putting his shoes on was the second thing we are ever taught, right. I mean potty training and putting your shoes on was what we were taught at a very young age so that kind of stays with you. But anyway, this person put his shoes & his pajamas, walked out the door and then they found him two days later frozen stiff, he was just frozen leaning up against a tree.

Chuck: Oh man.

Patrick: Yeah, so we hear stories like this all the time but yeah, interestingly enough, people do definitely put their shoes on before they walk out of the house.

Chuck: Now, what was your brainstorm on this? I mean, you are in that business, you are looking for ways to use GPS technology. What was the spark that said “you know what? Bingo! We have to take this Alzheimer’s market”. There is always something, it is either in 3 O’Clock in the morning you sit up or you are watching … something happens, right?

Patrick: Well, we originally were going to come out with this product for, I referred earlier for the needs’ market, we originally were going to come out with this product for the wants’ market for moms that want this for their kids. We just thought “oh, okay, what mom is not going to want to know where their kid is all the time”. So we were getting ready to launch and we received a phone call from a professor at George Mason University, Professor Andrew Carle who is a world-renowned expert on seniors and technology for seniors, he is just a pioneer in this space. And he called me and introduced himself and said “what do you know about Alzheimer’s and Dementia” and I said “not much” and we spent two hours on the phone. And he started reading of statistics to me.
Just like you did tonight, here in the show and I was so taken back and overwhelmed, I couldn’t believe the numbers when he said to me that millions of people have this, 60% of them will wander, if not found within a day, they are found dead. And he said “you have to do something for that demographic” and I remember I called our Board of Directors and Advisors, I mean our circle.

Chuck: Because you were ready to launch the chopper, you were ready to go.

Patrick: And we sat around and we said “maybe we have to rethink all of this” and we retooled and we regrouped and we refocused and decide to come out … and really hyper focus on this market.

Chuck: Now, interestingly you don’t really offer a child product now.

Patrick: We don’t.

Chuck: You don’t have something that size, if you have a kid with size 10 feet like my daughter maybe that would work but … most part not that small infant size or smaller size.

Patrick: So originally, our first generation product was a shoe … it was a GPS shoe. So we had a lot more room to put electronics and then we went to the insole, we were very limited and we still have to make it comfortable but it still has to work and so forth. So today we can go down to about a child size age 10 or 11. Now, age and foot size don’t always correlate but roughly yeah … an 8 year old with a big foot or a 14 year old with a little foot … roughly 10 or 11 year olds.

Chuck: Right, well it is still a child market though, I mean it is not infant but … there are other things that are infant centric. Because the infant is not going to walk away; that is more like for kidnapping. Which doesn’t happen very much by the way.

Patrick: We tell that to people all the time. Until your child is going to 1st grade, you should be around your child, you should be letting your 4 or 5 year old kid just running around so they don’t really need this. And even at the age of 6, 7 and 8 for the most part … this is when they become tweens, you know, 10 or 11 years old at that age one parent starts letting them potentially go to the mall or go to a friends’ house after school by themselves.
Up until 7 or 8, you are not really letting your kids out by themselves so I think today 10 or 11 is that age threshold by the end of this year we are looking to come out with a smaller size so potentially be able to address kids that are 8, 9 years old and then by next year, we will get down to the 5 or 6 year olds. But again I just don’t see that market being that … I think it is more of a novelty a lot of parents are going to say “I want it” and then after a while they may realize

Chuck: I am with you on that. I mean … it is horrific and there are child kidnappings, child abductions and we see a lot of children disappearing …

Patrick: But the statistics are very small.

Chuck: It is different compared to 60 million people walking around the earth and not knowing where they are going.

Patrick: That’s a real statistic. If you look at … you know, there are a million kids that go missing every year in the United States but 950,000 of them are runaways or parent abduction. So an actual, real kidnapping I think it is maybe even less than 10,000 a year. So yeah, if you are the family, if you are the parents of one of these 10,000 children, it is horrific, but when you are building a business you have to think about … we are like a 100,000,000 people and 60,000,000 of them are potential customers.

Chuck: It is fair … I am all for capitalism, I am a terrible capitalist by the way, but I am all for it, right. So I think that is fine argument. And now this is probably a size 10 …

Patrick: They are trimmed to fit …

Chuck: You trim them yourself just like a regular insole that’s alright.

Patrick: Yeah, when you get them, you get a …

Chuck: Just don’t trip the blue part.

Patrick: That’s right. You get them with some lines on the back and it says you can trim down to … don’t trim below this number or this base. Yeah, here it is, you can see it. So you see there is a “Do not trim below that line”.

Chuck: Very light, I mean, it is just as light as a regular insole, lighter than most.

Patrick: Yeah, Dr. Scholl’s meets LoJack. I mean it really what it is.

Chuck: Now, let’s talk about the connection to law enforcement. So here is how police departments work. If I take this to the chief and say “chief, I think it is a great idea”, you are trying to sell it to the chief. The chief is going to say “well, Patrick, I cannot just go and endorse a product because we are public servants” and that’s all fair, right?

Patrick: Absolutely.

Chuck: Although back in the day, we also had a duty to help people and sometimes we would give referrals for …

Patrick: Protect and to serve.

Chuck: That’s right. So sometimes I pull out a brochure from the state that says “here is a rape victim, safe house, here is a place to go get a detox”. So we do all for these kind of things, right? But police associations are quasi private organization of their members and they are used more for maybe public activities and it is so important to the community, the community gives the money and stuff.
I could see a lot of police associations looking at this because I mean, listen, if I was a cop, I would probably put this in my shoe. I know it might sound crazy but I am one of those crazy guys that go over the board. But for nothing else I know I have gone to the same house before as a police officer several times because grandma walked away or grandpa walked away or something happened.
And if I had a resource to say “you know what, I am not endorsing this, I am not selling this but you might want to call these guys here are Smart Sole and it might be something that can help you”. And I think, in these day and age, like we were talking in the green room, even if I said that recommendation, most people would say “yeah, yeah, thanks” but they are still going to go on Google and check things themselves.

Patrick: Absolutely.

Chuck: And they are going to look for competitive prices and competitive products and things like that.

Patrick: And reviews and all that, exactly. So I think that you are absolutely right. There is a lot of bureaucracy that is wrapped around police departments but we have spoken to enough already and like I said, from the largest ones like NYPD and down to smaller ones like San Diego or San Luis Obispo, they have all told … and by the way I am mentioning those names because they have tested the product, they have really gotten themselves acclimated to the technology and how it works and so forth. And what they all tell us is that this is so beneficial to their day and their day-out work …

Chuck: To them … it is selfish.

Patrick: Yeah because at the end of the day, they want to go out and stop crimes from happening and not only the cost that 10 – 11,000 dollar cost per 911 call is obviously pretty stiff.

Chuck: It is a serious matter because police officers are getting laid off because there is not enough money. Never happened in my day but it is common.

Patrick: Right. So I think everyone is aware that there are limited budgets – A – out there so if departments could save their money for other things, I think that’s a lot more important for them. B – what I have heard and you can probably corroborate this is the unintended consequences while there are two detectives driving around, there is a 7-Eleven that gets robbed, there is a home intrusion. That is because you have less police officers doing what they are supposed to be doing and doing something else.
So that gets factored into it. So at the end of the day, if we can provide a tool for the police departments that will enable and empower the community to go out and find their loved one that’s missing, that is one less 911 call, that is one less 10,000 dollar bill and that is probably one less home invasion or carjacking or a 7-Eleven being robbed.

Chuck: Well that’s one more win too because you get the person back immediately and by the way I think most of the times, the family is probably going to be able to handle this except extreme conditions maybe it’s a blizzard and the family can’t go out.

Patrick: But wouldn’t it be great if you got the call … you know like, “hello 911, can you go find my father, he is on the corner of 1st and Maine” right as opposed to “hello 911, can you go find my father, I don’t know where he is, he is just somewhere out there in the blizzard”. So there is a real serious advantage to empowering the caregivers. We are talking a lot about money but what about the emotional stress?
You said you have experienced it yourself, I know plenty of people that have experienced it; the thought of calling the police and then just waiting for waiting for them to … as opposed to you just get in your car and go and get grandpa and bring him home; it is just that feeling of being able to do it yourself, this is a do it yourself generation and that’s it.

Chuck: So, my neighbor who is basically landlocked in their house because of their parent and really gets to go out and do something, right. I could see this being used where … maybe she could go to the store for an hour because if this thing doesn’t go off and doesn’t activate, everything is fine. And if it does, she is two minutes away.

Patrick: That’s right. You could put a geo fence around the store so you can get an alert when she gets to the store and then you will get another if she wanders back out of the store. And if she leaves the store but goes in the opposite direction, get in your car and go get her. Again, you are saving having to make that 911 call.

Chuck: What else does … I am using my imagination here so Mr. Jarvis comes to mind. Mr. Jarvis, I am wondering if your wife might want to put this in your shoes. I don’t think so, I don’t think that would be necessary for you, you are a man of good moral character …

Jarvis: No.

Chuck: But let’s say we have a less than trusting wife or a spouse or a girlfriend. I could see them buying these just … “hey honey, I got you some new insoles for that conference you are going to in Vegas next week and I thought you would want to try them out”. Do you have any stories about that yet?

Patrick: We do get stories like that but they are far and few in between. First of all, you have privacy issues when it comes to things like that.

Chuck: Yeah, that’s a good point. That might be an invasion of that person’s privacy.

Patrick: That’s an absolute. When it comes to … if it is your mother or father that has Alzheimer’s or your child that has Autism and you are the official caregiver, those privacy issues no longer … you are the caregiver. But yeah, putting a tracking device on a person unbeknownst to them, I believe there would be some criminal violations.

Chuck: So let’s talk about that. So you are in how many countries?

Patrick: We currently … we have distributers in 20 countries and we are selling in close to 35 countries.

Chuck: Have you ever come across a country where that you can’t sell in maybe or it is more difficult because the privacy thing is an issue regardless of Alzheimer’s? Let’s talk about that.

Patrick: Yes. So Germany …

Chuck: Don’t say China. I don’t want my Internet interrupted.

Patrick: No, we don’t sell in China.

Chuck: Okay, good. Well, there is a market, oh boy.

Patrick: Yeah, it is a big market but we don’t sell in China as of yet. So Germany is one of those markets that privacy is a very big issue and so we have had to … and their equivalents to HIPAA. So there is a lot going on there and … no, we are selling in Germany, we are doing really well, we have a great partner based out of Germany, a good distribution partner and actually our telecommunication are SIM card, because there is a SIM card in your phone …

Chuck: Oh sure, yeah, that’s right.

Patrick: So we have an agreement with Telefonica which is the world’s fifth largest wireless provider globally. They are Spain headquartered but deal with their company out of, they have an affiliate out of Germany – out of Munich.

Chuck: So you say there is a German equivalent to HIPAA? Now, that is where they have their privacy issue in a medical context?

Patrick: Yes …

Chuck: Not a private home, a private home could buy this and that’s okay.

Patrick: Yeah, absolutely. But if it is in a kind of a medical setting … the other thing is, we need to keep the data … like in Germany for example all our data is stored in Germany.

Chuck: Oh, interesting.

Patrick: Canada is another country. We have to have all the data stored in Canada.

Chuck: So you have to set up servers there.

Patrick: They can’t be … the servers can’t be in the United States. And again, these are their compliant like HIPAA.

Chuck: I could see … that’s reasonable to me.

Patrick: But the whole privacy issue, specifically privacy, it goes away when you are talking about you are the caregiver, you are cleaning that person, you are feeding that person, you are giving that person medication. So let me get this straight – but you can’t know where they are if they wander off? So it is like the argument just falls apart. So you could administer medication to the person but you can’t look on your phone to see where they are if they leave the house.

Chuck: So you do sell in Germany? You just have a couple of hurdles you have to comply.

Patrick: Yeah, we sell.

Chuck: Any countries you just can’t, they won’t just allow it?

Patrick: No, so far no. We have had to put data there like I said Canada, we had to put data there; Germany we had to put our servers there, Denmark, Sweden. We do really well in all of northern Europe.

Chuck: Now, let’s talk about data protection and how you handle it in the United States because we have an issue with that here and we are far field, I mean, we want Apple to crack the phone but we don’t really want Apple to crack our phone. We are all over the place on this. But I could see this being used in an incorrect way, just like anything can be, so just talk about how you encrypt it, how you keep track of it, what you store, what you don’t store and stuff.

Patrick: Great question. So, we do protect our servers with 286 encryption; we have a very redundant and robust firewall on the servers so from a hardware perspective. Once, if someone were to get into and through our firewall and actually into our databases, we have the content of that database offset and what I mean by that – are you familiar with an Excel spreadsheet?

Chuck: Sure.

Patrick: And so you know how in an Excel spreadsheet everything is linear. You start with stuff in column A, stuff in column B; so the way we did it is just think of an Excel spreadsheet where the person’s name is in column A, their location is in column B, their UDID number – Unique ID number is in column C. So it is not linear. So if someone would have hacked into our database, you can’t just go across and scroll and go “Oh, Chuck lives at this address, here is his unique ID and here is where he is today”. Because where you are would be somewhere in the database, it is not at all correlated to you. And we have a special algorithm that connects all those dots …

Chuck: You have a primary key that you know whose record goes through …

Patrick: That’s right. The record itself from an average … and then if you really think about it even if a really, really sophisticated hacker, because that’s what it would take – because nothing is impossible, if the Pentagon can get hacked, we can certainly get hacked. But we have put in a tremendous amount of safeguards but my point is so someone hacks … goes through all the trouble of hacking us to find out where your grandpa is. What are they going to get out of that?

Chuck: I have an evil genius brain and if I was a bad guy, we would all be in big trouble. So I would say in the case of … I am just throwing this off top of my head … but sometimes grandpas are multibillionaires and where grandpa is or isn’t and who is taking care of him and who is not taking care of him like they should can become an issue. And maybe somebody goes in and deletes the data because now there is no record that he wandered off because look “I am a perfect caregiver” but in fact you are not taking care of him and we are going to take you off as a trustee. So I could see that be valuable and especially in elderly cases that tend to have estates.

Patrick: You really are evil …

Chuck: Am I right?

Patrick: Yeah, yeah. Like I said, the Pentagon can get hacked, Sony Studios can be hacked. We do everything that we can to mitigate and minimize the potential of crime.

Chuck: Now I ask you this question, why do we need to save it? For any period of time, in other words, if grandpa didn’t wander off today aren’t we kind of done with worrying about that?

Patrick: So, it is really interesting. We get more people want that data saved so we can study grandpa’s patterns.

Chuck: Good point.

Patrick: Does he have a tendency to go somewhere specific as Autistic children do? So if we can learn that and study that, we can maybe ultimately anticipate where they are going to go. So that is one. Two – for legal reasons, just to be able to …

Chuck: Oh, you are showing you are a good caregiver. That’s a good point.

Patrick: To prove that, you know, we have been monitoring grandpa, we know where he has been. So there is a combination of reasons why but we can delete that data daily if we wanted to. We store it typically for 90 days so someone … if you wanted to find out where was grandpa last month …

Chuck: Well, it might be important to where he is going. I mean maybe the battery dies and we have a pattern now where he is always going on Wednesdays. That’s a good point. Now, you’ve got some stuff coming up with law enforcement … I want to look through my notes real quick. Last week you launch the Trust and Protect campaign and there was another campaign as well you mentioned with cops, how was that one called?

Patrick: COPsync.

Chuck: Tell us about that initiative. What is going on with that?

Patrick: Yeah, so we signed a strategic alliance with a company called COPsync, they are based out of Texas and they were founded by police officers and years ago they did a routine stop and one of the partners got shot and killed. The car they pulled over had just committed a robbery and been on record that he had said that the next cop that pulls him over, he was going to shoot him.
And anyway, the guys got pulled over in a different county and so they had no way … the officers that had dealt with that person in a separate county had no way of getting that information to the other officers in the other county.
So what the guys at COPsync did is they retired from the force and they put together a network, a cloud-based platform, so that they can store information and detail – actionable information – this person just robbed a store – you know, stuff more beyond their … typically right now, as you well know, information that is stored in law enforcement databases is criminal convictions.

Chuck: Well, yes but criminal convictions are public record. But a non-conviction in an interaction with you is not necessarily … it is not stored. It is called a rap sheet, that means you were stopped but what we didn’t do is arrest you.

Patrick: Right.

Chuck: But we know about your history.

Patrick: So if in that routine traffic stop, imagine that person made some derogatory comments, said something, made a threat or whatever, and that was recorded and stored and then somehow or other, that is attached to that person’s license plate so the next time that he gets pulled over, the officer pulling him over doesn’t just see whether or not this car is registered, has a valid registration, but it links him to Joe the driver of this car could be hostile, could be carrying something.

Chuck: Which you display in public because saying anything to a police officer is public. There is no expectation of privacy so I can see how that is completely legal. I haven’t played an alert on the radio yet … let me say that again … it might be legal, right Jarvis, when we go backwards a little. It makes sense.

Patrick: So the reason why we formed this alliance is kind of two-fold. So one is they go after their target market is police department so they sell a software as a service platform.

Chuck: So that software is going to be attached to their dispatch system and allow you to keep notes in there and sync it together, okay.

Patrick: And then they cans share that information over non-judicial communication protocols. So they are knocking on the doors of police departments so one of the things we are going to do is because we have a backend platform that is location-based, we are going to let COPsyncs’ platform tap into our backend platform.
So now police officers and the department could not only communicate with each other but also can know where they all are once they leave their patrol car. Because patrol cars are being monitored, they are GPS-ed but you leave your car, there is no way to know. So if you are carrying a phone or a device on you, they would know where the police officer is, it will all be funneled in through their platform.
And then secondly, we go to knock on doors of a lot police departments not because we want to sell them something but we want to create awareness. So we want to let them know that we have this great product called the Smart Soles and most of them recognize that and so … but some police departments want security, they want the ability to have that communication be compliant with some of the tools that they use so then we can offer up the COPsync platform and say “our product is a plug-in to the COPsync platform”.
So if you are already a COPsync customer or if you are thinking about getting it, then you can get our product and now you can not only see your officers but all the 911 calls you make for missing persons, you can them recommend our product. And we have got some police departments, I am not going to mention who, but we had certain police departments go out and get grants. Because they are saying “look, 10,000 dollars for a search and rescue or I buy one of these things for 300 dollars and I give them away, I am 9,700 dollars in a plus”.
So if the Federal government is willing to give or the State is willing to give us a grant for this, you know 5-10 000 dollars, they can by 50, 60, 80 pairs and give them out; that is the difference in potentially 50 or 60 or 10,000 dollar 911 call.

Chuck: And by the way, they know, a good police department now with all the metrics they have, they know how many wandering Alzheimer’s patients they have had. They know how many critical missing … they know those numbers.

Patrick: Absolutely.

Chuck: So let’s say Burbank PD has had 10 of those and each cost 200 each on average and I am going to spend 12,000 bucks with you instead and I am going save … yeah, it’s a no-brainer. And they are not endorsing a product, they are just using this … you know what, this would be used just like I would buy a new mace, a Taser, it is a tool. It is a tool for me to help the community.

Patrick: A technological tool.

Chuck: Exactly.

Patrick: And they can do whatever … they can either buy them and give them away, they can recommend them, they can get the State involved so for people with a little income, for example, we are covered by the Medicate Reimbursement Code.

Chuck: Oh, that’s interesting.

Patrick: So the police departments can interact with the community and with this tool, these GPS Smart Soles, in a multitude of ways, whichever way is best for them. Again, we are not trying to sell the police departments, we are just trying to create awareness and let them know that there is something there and that can really help them and help save a lot of lives as well.

Chuck: Oh yeah, a lot of lives.

Patrick: So last week, the CEO of COPsync Ron and myself were in New York and in New Jersey and we were part of the Trust and Protect campaign and also part of the Blue Alert Foundation. So Trust and Protect was created by a good friend of mine – Jack Brewer – who is a UN ambassador, he is a retired NFL player, he is a businessman and philanthropist. And he put together … I think we have a video coming up … so he put together a foundation called Trust and Protect which basically is a way to divide, to bridge the divide between law enforcement and the communities out there.
We hear a lot about lives matter and it should be all lives matter. Blue lives, white lives, black lives, it should all be about … the community needs to understand as best they can that law enforcement is out there working tirelessly to help and protect us. Everybody and we really do need them out there and we have to show our respect so Trust and Protect is a really good cause that we are behind and we were in New York for that launch. And then last May, President Obama signed into Law the Blue Alert initiative.
So the Blue Alert initiative … think like amber alerts on the freeway for missing kids, so the Blue Alert initiative informs law enforcement agencies if an officer has been shot and gives out description just like an amber alert – Suzy has been missing, we think Joe took her in a red pick-up truck – this is Officer Mahoney has been shot, we think it is this bad guy that shot him and he is in this vehicle. So it is the same concept, they are operating in a multitude of states right now and so we are …

Chuck: That’s important because if you shoot a police officer the last place you want to be is anywhere as near that and a lot of times they are trying to get out of the state as fast as they can. And communication … LAPD is going to put out a teletype or … that’s old technology but you know what I am saying. And it takes a while to filter down maybe a day or two but maybe the guy is driving right past us and if we had a quicker alert system we would know.

Patrick: Right, so when you look at what is happening with the Blue Alert Foundation, Tom Berry is the founder, he is doing a great job, he is actually this week, it is a 501(c)3 so it is a non-profit so he does a lot of fundraising because in addition to having set up this network he also provides financial support for fallen families of law enforcement.
So this week, starting today, they are doing a bike ride from Miami to Daytona Beach – it is a 5 day bike ride, over 5000 police officers are going to be participating, our GPS tracking technology is going to be on a couple of these officers so their families could log on and track and see where they are because a lot of them can’t obviously go down to Florida and follow them during the 5 days.
So anyway, last week was really great, we went to Patterson New Jersey, we met with Mayor Torres, I got to speak in front of an audience of about 60 police officers; again, promoting the Blue Alert Foundation and promoting Trust to Protect and obviously working with COPsync hand-in-hands in order to really talk to the law enforcement agencies about the tools they provide and we provide to help better their policing and help sharpen their ability to solve crimes or prevent crimes, the whole gambit. Let’s give them tools, I think you can appreciate that, right?

Chuck: I was … and Jarvis knows this … my nickname at the police department was Inspector Gadget. Remember the Inspector Gadget cartoon? Because I looked a little bit like Don Adams back in the day and I could do his voice and stuff but I had my first computer in 1984, I brought it into the police station to do police reports and the chief thought I was a nut job – “Computer? What are you doing? What is that?” And police departments do take a little longer to catch up to technology.
It is not for lack of trying, I think it is budget, it is approval, it is culture, it is all those kinds of things. So I think it is really important that we stay on this as police officers and evolve and go along kicking and screaming but you have to adopt the technology, you have to use it because it is going to help you.

Patrick: And that is really our message and also to get back a little bit to the Trust to Protect initiative, I feel like as a CEO of a technology company, it is our duty to develop technologies that will help the community and law enforcement in every which way we can. I mean, I really truly believe that. We have to, in the private sector, help you guys. You are out there on the front line helping us every day, keeping us safe, whatever it is that you are doing, you are all doing a really good job of it so all I can say is “Thank you. We really appreciate it” and if we can do anything to pay you guys back, that’s our job – I look at that like it is our obligation.

Chuck: That’s a great way to look at it and it really is all about communication and reaching out to people and just talking, when you talk it through, when you talk the communities through; you know, if the police officers walked around and had one of these in their pockets and pass it out to some family that needed it that couldn’t afford it, that is a win for everybody. We have about three minutes, Jarvis? So give me, if you can, I mean I am not asking you to hold me to any special Cosco price or anything, but what is a basic going to go for, what is a monthly fee, all that kind of stuff.

Patrick: Sure. So it is $299 retail.

Chuck: That is just like my vest over here $299 it is great. And that is going to cost you like $1000 few years ago, it is amazing.

Patrick: Not even because the technology was not even available to be that small and robust so it is $299 and then …

Chuck: One pair of insoles?

Patrick: One pair, right. With a charger and everything. And then you get an app that is included. And then there is a monthly service fee of roughly $30 … so it is a dollar a day. I mean, it is less than a cup of coffee. And again, I don’t like to spend anybody’s money and maybe a dollar a day is a lot but for most of the families we have talked to, if your loved one goes missing for even 5 minutes, during those 5 minutes, you will pay anything to get them back. And that is what I have been told.

Chuck: I think it is a very reasonable price. And I think that if your family that is in the less economically … in the outside … I still think you can afford that. I am thinking you have to afford that.

Patrick: We give veterans and law enforcement agencies a 10% discount; in certain states California and Minnesota, and there are about 4 or 5 states, New Jersey I believe, there are some reimbursement codes that come from the State.

Chuck: Oh like a … there are insurance codes … reimbursements?

Patrick: Yeah.

Chuck: Oh, that’s interesting. That makes sense. And like if I wanted to buy a 1000 of these for my military veterans’ home and I can get discount of 10%.

Patrick: We have wholesale pricing. So if you are the VA or if you are a large police institution and you want to come to us, we can obviously work out a wholesale price.

Chuck: I don’t see why and I might be wrong with this but I am not sure why … because I started a police officer association back in the day, anything with the national labor and all the ins and outs but I am not sure there is any reason I couldn’t buy a bunch of these from you and sell them to raise money as a fundraiser. Or donate them to the community … a lot of things.

Patrick: We would bring in a non-profit charitable organization to work side by side and we would donate, we have donated pairs, we have donated the service and we work with the community. Again, there are millions of people out there that need this, not everybody can afford it, so we will do what we can to …

Chuck: Figure out a way to make it work. Oh, one minute, Mr. Jarvis. Did you learn something once again?

Jarvis: Always.

Chuck: He is my canary in a coal mine. And in every show he says “I did not know that” and that is amazing, right? It is interesting stuff and I am really up on technology and when I saw this I just thought “of course, it is a no-brainer, it is great”.

Patrick: It is one of those … like “why didn’t anybody think of this …”

Chuck: Exactly.

Patrick: But I did.

Chuck: Very good. Give us your website, how we can get a hold of you? All that kinds of stuff.

Patrick: Alright. It is Patrick Bertagna, the name of the company is GTX Corp, the website is www.gtxcorp.com and our product is the GPS SmartSole and that website is www.gpsSmartSole.com – all one word – www.gpsSmartSole.com.

Chuck: Excellent. Time for goodbye. Patrick, thanks for coming on the Security Guy Radio.

Patrick: Chuck, thank you very much. It was really a pleasure.

Chuck: Anytime you want to come by, give us an update, let us know and you know, you maybe call on the station one day and give us an update on some of those police initiatives that are going on across the country.

Patrick: Sure, I would love to.

Chuck: See you next week. Tune in for another exiting adventure on Security Guy Radio every Monday night at 7. And remember; follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr, Google, YouTube, SoundCloud, Pinterest, iTunes, TuneIn and now securityguyradio.com. Good night. See you next week.

Orion Entrance Control is an American manufacturer located in New Hampshire. Orion provides the world with technically superior, architecturally pleasing optical turnstile solutions for high-rise buildings, government centers, education campuses and corporate headquarters.

Chuck Harold & Guests

Full text of radio show

Please forgive any typos, this podcast was transcribed by my typing pool comprised of volunteer stalkers.

Chuck: Hi, welcome to Security Guy Radio, so what’s your name?

Steve: Thanks Chuck. My name is Steve Caroselli.

Chuck: What do you do Steve?

Steve: I’m with Orion Entrance Control Incorporated. We are a turnstile manufacturer located in Laconia, New Hampshire.

Chuck: Oh, a manufacturer, I’m glad to hear that, because we don’t see many manufacturers. USA?

Steve: USA 100% owned and operated.

Chuck: All right. Excellent and what you guys do?

Steve: We manufacture optical turnstiles, so turnstiles with any kind of glass barrier, metal barrier, moving barriers with optical sensors to deduct passage of motion as you walk through the lane.

Chuck: All right. I’m very intrigued I. we looked at this before we started filming and we’re going to see some really, really cool stuff. How big is your company?

Steve: So, the company is just turning seven years old this year. We are in it and we ship internationally and we’ve been shipping to about nine different countries last year for Amazon. We’re their corporate standard there.

Chuck: Oh, good now are turnstiles to cover the new standard?

Steve: Oh, turnstiles have been the standard since about 09 /11.

Chuck: Well, but nobody has them because they are super expensive, right.

Steve: Yeah, they are super expensive, that’s one of our favorite parts, but no, they’re really become the standard for most corporations, high-rise buildings, campuses, a lot of Universities. We’re starting to see them at hospitals we work with Children’s hospital in Philadelphia.

Chuck: Yeah, the days of the pen and paper access control are way gone. I mean IC companies even that they can afford it they still don’t go that way. I don’t get it, but maybe they just don’t understand the technology.

Steve: Oh, yeah. Yeah, there is a lot of education in what we do. We spend a lot of time working with the architects, with the consultants, specifically the integrators as well.

Chuck:Now back in the day, I worked at Fox and Disney for ten years, so we had a big check book. We could buy turnstiles; we never did, with a lot of social reasons for it in other words, we didn’t think the employees would like it. We thought the employees might think it’s too restricted. Now, that’s a movie environment, of course, so a little bit more liberal, let’s say, right. Do you find there is a social resistance to turnstiles?

Steve: There can be.

Chuck: As opposed to financial.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely, yeah, some campuses as for an example, we did Facebook’s campus about four or five years ago and there was a big bush not include barriers, so there’s a lot of education, we showed a lot of educational video prior to the implementation also can be insurance. We really focused on two things, when you go from a. from a non-turnstile environment to a turnstile environment that’s one set of education another is going for a pure optical with no barriers to a barrier environment. We do a lot of education around that as well.

Chuck: So, when we were looking at this year’s ago, one of the prompts were, were proprietary systems. So, my check point access control, wouldn’t integrated with the turnstiles, so guess what we’re not going to do it. Is that really an issue nowadays?

Steve: Yes. It really is that’s a great question though, so we. I tell people we’re basically a door on your access control system. The purpose of this door is to validate that one credential whether it’s a badge, facial recognition or biometrics of some sort, one passage, so that’s the whole point of an optical turnstiles to validate and stop tailgating.

Chuck: So, I can use head, I can use check point; I can use any access control systems I want.

Steve: Absolutely.

Chuck: your system is smart and it can say that’s fine. We’ll plug it in your reader; we’ll plug in whatever it is.

Steve: Yeah.

Chuck: Do you manufacture reader as well.

Steve: We do not.

Chuck: Okay just a turnstile that’s good.

Steve: So we’re specifically an optical turnstile company…

Chuck: It’s actually a specialty…

Steve: That allows us to integrate with everybody on the planet.

Chuck: All right, that’s great. You want to show us some gadgets, this is my favorite part.

Steve: I do, absolutely.

Chuck: All right let’s get the tripod going here.

Steve: So, some of the simple things as visitor management as an example. A lot of people issue a bar code, so we can take any bar code and scan the turnstile with the visitor and walk through. You just stay there, I’ll come right back out. This particular unit is our swing arm unit, it’s one of our most popular and it’s set up of for free exits so I can walk-out with no issues. We can then take the same unit, if I can find my badge.

Chuck: Now barcode easier to defeat or…?

Steve: Yes. You know, so the issue with bar code is you can literally photo copy that send it to your phone et cetera. What people will use this for is visitor management primarily. So, if you wanted to email somebody a barcode on a phone, they could use their phone or a lot people use a paper badge because they are inexpensive. So, Standard Prox, HID Prox badge, same read head you can walk through.

Chuck: Same reader?

Steve: Yeah.

Chuck: Oh, interesting, now.

Steve: So, this is an IBC reader, International Bar Code and they have integrated the antenna from HID or in dollars right into those.

Chuck: So, push those bars here for me are those, how rich are those bars?

Steve: So, the bars are actually very slack, by fire code you should be able to push through with five to 15 pounds of pressure in either direction.

Chuck: Oh, that’s when it’s open, oh, that’s locked.

Steve: The fire department wants to be able to get through.

Chuck: Oh, interesting, okay.

Steve: So, I can push through, but we cause them alarm, which you probably can’t hear right now, because of the show, but it’s an alarm it’s flashing.

Chuck: Right. Okay, I didn’t know that. Now, in the old days weren’t they rigid?

Steve: The old barriers were definitely rigid, but the optical have always been push through. So, would you have a breaking feature, one step back so I can show you…?

We do have a breaking feature to allow in certain circumstance to lock the units. So, it’s an electronic break.

Chuck: [Indiscernible] [0:05:22].

Steve: We do that a lot on our Swing Glass; the image on the back wall is Amazon’s location in China, so we lock those positively.

Chuck: Does it do fail safe, fall secure.

Steve: Feel safe all the time.

Chuck: So, it will open, I mean you could push on it, but it will go to open in some kind of fire situation.

Steve: Oh, yeah, yeah. So, we’re connected to the fire system. We also have our software here that you can all open feature, our Staples headquarters is an example, wanted to be all open in a non-fire related emergency bomb threat, active shooter, so we put a button right on the software that open everything. Yeah.

Chuck: Right. Excellent all right, what else you could show me?

Steve: I’d like to take a moment and show you the software. One of the thing that’s neat about Orion…

Chuck: Not sure what’s going to come out, we’ll a give try in that.

Steve: We’ll give it a shot, we’ll talk it through. One of the nice things that neat about Orion is own a 100% of our technology.

Chuck: That’s little unusual, isn’t it?

Steve: Yeah, it is. We design our board so we don’t use a BLC. The boards are built in New Hampshire and then we write our own software, so the algorithms that run the turnstile as well as what the guard sees and for service and support, so for an access control installer they’ll be able to go through, go into the lane, this is what a guard would typically see to let people in and out, or disable for the…

Chuck: That’s very user-friendly.

Steve: It really is. The IO screen allows you to turn the volume up and down up from here, so I’m going to turn that up since it was a little bit quiet for our demonstration there. You can see the activity of all of the IO whether or not the fire input’s active, so I had a call from a Department of Justice a few weeks ago, saying “Hey”, 6:30 in the morning I’m the only one there to answer the phone. Hey the lanes are open we don’t know why. I walked them through the software, they saw that the fire input was off and realized immediately what had happened. Turned the fire input back on and away they go. The nice thing about our software again is we count everything at both directions all the time, so we’re able to push out data like how many people are in the building right now, whether or not a turnstile needs to be serviced based on user counts. We connect to building automation systems for instance. One example of accounting scenario is at the Penn State University, they wanted to go to the Rec centers, put turnstiles in and then push out to a student APP how busy the Rec center is, so that a student can look at the APP and go, “Oh I’m going to Rec center A instead of B,” because B has got a 150 people and then A has got 20, so neat applications like that.

Chuck: Oh, interesting. Can they use the APP to gain access?

Steve: They can on a different type of APP.

Chuck: Yeah. They have a bar code reader. Like at the airport.

Steve: Exactly. Yeah.

Chuck: Oh, interesting really cool.

Steve: So, we do a lot of that as a matter of fact, this unit we build for airport fast boarding, so it has the bar code reader in it again with the HID reader for the attendance and the status indicator light.

Chuck: So, you mentioned Facebook? Who else did you say…?

Steve: Yes, Amazon. Yeah, we’re the Cargo Global Corporate Center for Amazon, The Department of Justice. We do a lot of Universities, we do MIT, Yale.

Chuck: Right, so here is one I’m impressed about. You don’t have a 1000 square foot booth

Steve: No. We don’t.

Chuck: Those are expensive.

Steve: They are.

Chuck: All right so [indiscernible] company’s financially solvent and frugal…

Steve: Absolutely, yeah.

Chuck: Makes a lot of sense.

Steve: Yeah, we are over a 100% debt free. We believe in debt-free running company actually from day one.

Chuck: See, how I guessed that. You put up one of these gigantic mega booths

Steve: Oh, very expensive.

Chuck: They’re expensive.

Steve: Yes and we think we show very well we are typically very busy at the shows.

Chuck: Now I travel a lot and go through all of airports. I’ve seen these scanners when I go to gates. How do I know it’s yours any branding?

Steve: No, not all, so we, because we are very architectural specific, we don’t currently have any at airports we’re testing units with a couple of different airlines, that hasn’t really come to America strong yet, but there are in test with several door manufacturers…

Chuck: How many of your people, you know, they kind of worked most of the times what I’ve seen, right.

Steve: Yeah.

Chuck: It’s got to work all the time.

Steve: Yes, so we do a lot of the competition not being used at the airports, so it’s a new concept for airports.

Chuck: But, as we saw with off camera you showed me this next one this, the main…

Steve: Yeah. I will show you this, so we are highlighting a number of new technologies. I pointed out that the bar code that’s pretty standard for visitor management. This next unit we’re actually showing a new technology, facial technology from a company called Blueline. What’s neat about Blueline there are a bunch of ex-police officers that came over the technology, the primary programmer was with the army and developed this program on the side, retired became a police officer brought it to his Chief and they developed this company, Blueline.

Chuck: Wow, fabulous.

Steve: So, I’m a technology junkie, so I really love when something works and facials have been difficult to get running.

Chuck: Yeah, its hit and miss you know.

Steve: Yeah, yeah, so I saw this I St. Louis about three years ago for the first time and it worked right away, so I’ve tracked with them and I’ve invited them into our booth to show their technology.

Chuck: Oh, excellent, all right.

Steve: Oh, I will show you real quick if can.

Chuck: Now this is a really wide shot. We will do wide shot first and then I’ll zoom in on that screen up there, yeah.

Steve: Yeah and the camera [indiscernible] so, the screen is there, you can see I go green and sees me and I walk through I got turnstile activity in motion.

Chuck: Pick up your microphone and say it again.

Steve: So, turnstile activity in motion, so you can literally walk through…

Chuck: You know what I’ll do, let me shoot the screen while you are walking in, right.

Steve: Okay. Oh, come on in and you can shoot the screen, I’ll back out and then come back through.

Chuck: All right, so there you are on the screen.

Steve: ….my head down, I’m going to look at the camera, you see it pick me up. My name is on there and I come right in.

Chuck: That’s amazing.

Steve: Yeah. It’s a beautiful technology.

Chuck: I mean you didn’t really have to stop. You just kind of walked out and went through.

Steve: Yeah. So, in motion is what we look for in turnstiles, because your typical turnstile is about a one to two second transaction. So, we need very fast authentication to not break that stride.

Chuck: Yeah, we did a study at Fox at the gate like 20 years ago and we had to get people through faster 5,000 visitors in cars. Right, hand your ID blah, blah, blah, so it went to a little simple reader and we decreased the time we took to get in there by 30 second a person, which equaled hours.

Steve: It’s amazing.

Chuck: Yeah, equals hours of delay.

Steve: Yeah, it adds up very quickly.

Chuck: This is really neat stuff.

Steve: So, why don’t we exit, we’ll exit through Swinging Glass unit, you can follow me there right through. So, you’ll notice it stays open between transactions, so you don’t have to; a lot of people on the old days we used to call have an optical mode that we turned into put the barriers away during high traffic situation.

Chuck: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve: So, what we’ve done is, we’ve added a staking and a lot of people mode. So, that as it sees a lot of activity they will just stay open, as long as it sees valid activity, so you don’t have to wait for the barriers to transact.

Chuck: Now if I was going to do it and I was rich. I’d buy two of these and I’d create a Sally port.

Steve: Yeah.

Chuck: People will be mad at me, they’d wait line, but I don’t care could you set that up if you want to do.

Steve: Yeah. That’s a fantastic question, so we do that for unmanned entrances an optical turnstile by design typically you have a guard standing by the side.

Chuck: Usually, yeah.

Steve: Because you can push through, right. We can positively lock this and do that, so we created a Sally-port for an unmanned entrance in San Francisco for McKesson’s world Headquarters. We had this unit actually. Four or five lanes upstairs in their main lobby and in their lower lobby when you came off the subway they had a hallway they wanted to use. So, we put these two of these in a row and added a machine vision camera in the middle to do the band trap. So, it’s all linked together as one system, so you badge your card here, you go in and you know what I mean, Chuck?

Chuck: Yeah, yeah

Steve: So, yeah, we absolutely do that. Same scenario if you think about exit breach in an airport coming out, so we use machine vision imaging to validate where the activities coming from and then the turnstile validates one person in the lane at a time.

Chuck: This usually an in turnstile…?

Steve: Yeah.

Chuck: And an out turnstile or not?

Steve: We’re bi-directional, so I always encourage people to have multiple lanes. One you can create a bottleneck at least two lanes and people are kind so automatically they’ll move out the way for each other, but a turnstile will handle, you know, 30 people a minute.

Chuck: The reason I’m asking you because I always wanted to know who is in my building at any second.

Steve: Yes.

Chuck: Fire evacuation whatever, right?

Steve: Absolutely.

Chuck: I assume you can set this up to read in and read out…?

Steve: Yes.

Chuck: Or not read out if you wanted to?

Steve: Yeah, so we’re showing here all the turnstiles are read in free exit.

Chuck: Free exit.

Steve: What you’ll notice on the other side we’re already set up to accept the exit reader.

Chuck: Yeah. Well what do most companies pick?

Steve: We do all of that…

Chuck: Most companies pick exit read?

Steve: It definitely depends on the scenario, so your typical high-rise building in New York City multi-tenant is going to be a card in free out. When we go into a campus environment like Zurich Insurance or Amazon they are carding in and out.

Chuck: See I don’t want in and out because I want to know if you are actually at work when you said you weren’t, you know what I mean?

Steve: Yeah.

Chuck: That kind of thing.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely.

Chuck: Interesting, well it’s a cost analysis.

Steve: Yeah cost analysis and the anti-piggybacking so within the access control system I can’t pass my card back to you. Anti pass back.

Chuck: Now, let’s talk about the integration part. Well you know what first let’s see this little gadget here. This is kind of amazing.

Steve: This is really cool.

Chuck: We are going to wide shot for this.

Steve: Yes, please do that.

Chuck: This is not your reader.

Steve: No, this is the Morpho Safran WAVE tower. We took all the guts out of it and made it really sexy on the turnstile, so essentially you can wave your fingers one of the four finger prints and it grand access through.

Chuck: That’s amazing.

Steve: Then I’m at a free exit back out.

Chuck: I mean you did really you did it very quickly.

Steve: Yeah, so we again we look for things in motions, so I can walk to the turnstile badge in and walk through.

Chuck: That is amazing.

Steve: Yeah, so those are the kind of technologies we look to integrate with because that’s what our customers are looking for. We try to take more of an advisory role. We talk about what’s the score card before selecting a turnstile company that’s one of the things we talk about is; do you want the technology, can you integrate with any of the newer technology that’s something we do really well.

Chuck: Yeah, now I’m a big guy with two [indiscernible]

Steve: Yes.

Chuck: So, can I hook this up, so it’s a big pain for the employees, but too bad. I was an evil Security Director by the way. I didn’t care if the police are mad about it, right, so I’d say you are going to scan your finger prints and you are going to scan your card.

Steve: Yeah. Well, this can be set up card reader right in the front and your finger prints.

Chuck: Right, which makes it easy?

Steve: Or we can connect facial and finger print, so any number of technologies.

Chuck: Again what most people do it in your business?

Steve: Yeah, most people are looking for ways to make it easier user experience again 95% of our single factor authentications; it’s your high rise building that’s moving a lot of people in fast.

Chuck: But, an easier user experience is not a more secure user experience.

Steve: It’s a challenge.

Chuck: I know, yeah.

Steve: We have that conversation. The architects are pushing for easy and fast. The CEOs are pushing for get people in to work fast, so we’re always looking out for things like elevator destination dispatch, so badge a card calls the elevator car and tells you what car to go to, things like that as you pointed out, you save seconds off of the time, equates of the hours of the activity.

Chuck: Exactly, exactly, very, very neat.

Steve: Yeah, so those are the things we look at. We some of the things we do differently Chuck, is because I come from an integration background and a lot of my people come from an integration background we understand the business.

Chuck: You guys get it.

Steve: We get it.

Chuck: That’s very important. Most people don’t get the integration part.

Steve: Yeah. So, not only we get the integration part, but we get the project management part, so when we get an order for turnstile at Orion. We immediately turn out a drawing that says here is what we think you wanted to buy, sign off if that’s correct. Lane widths, style, colors, we’ll send our fit and finish, but then we also have a conference call with all the stake holders and we walk them through here is what the process is going to look like, so we know, you need floor templates at certain time. The electrician needs certain wiring at a certain time and we’ll walk you through that process. In my experience in the industry the typical project goes you give me a purchase order, you expect turnstiles in 12-weeks. We tell you along the process and our shipping time is more six to eight weeks, but we. every week you’re going to get an update from us and depending on it’s that the end user and we have currently we’re doing Rolex’s headquarters in New York city and we’re on a weekly conference call with them with all the other stake holders, so they know where we are.

Chuck: Yeah. That’s the way to do it.

Steve: Any deliveries and it’s especially with construction sites like that. We’re just in time delivery, so we are the last people to get installed and it’s the highest feature in the lobby.

Chuck: Do, if we lose all power in the building, any battery back up on the stuff to go…

Steve: There can be.

Chuck: Get everybody out of the building?

Steve: Yeah, so we partner with Life Safety power as our power supply company and they have battery options, so we can drive this open in this case if there was no battery backup you drop out ounces of pressure to push this away. Our sliding units that open like in this direction those are all spring balance so they automatically retract.

Chuck: Now If you’re listening to this on the podcast, go to YouTube, you can see all these, these are really architecturally very, very stylish…

Steve: Yes, thank you.

Chuck: Turnstiles and again if I wanted marble on top there and I wanted to pay for it you’re going to do it for me.

Steve: Absolutely.

Chuck: Yes, it’s great.

Steve: Yeah we do marble, we do Brass we do painted. We had a customer come in last year and said can you do this again. They had a 1000 lane project in South America. We can do it all day long. You want us to paint turnstiles we do that in our shops.

Chuck: Yeah excellent. Name of the company?

Steve: Orion Entrance Control Incorporated.

Chuck: Your name, sir.

Steve: My name is Steve Caroselli. I’m the President and Founder of the company.